Google CEO Sundar Pichai will appear at the White House on Thursday alongside other Silicon Valley leaders as a cloud of suspicion hangs over his company in the wake of several reports in recent months of bias against conservatives and specifically supporters of President Donald Trump.
According to the Associated Press, Pichai will join top executives from other tech giants like Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, and Qualcomm.
“The White House says the Thursday meeting will address efforts to advance American leadership in innovation and how that will affect jobs, industries and the economy,” the AP reported. “Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty, Oracle co-CEO Safra Catz and Qualcomm CEO Steven Mollenkopf are among the expected attendees.”
At this stage, it is unclear if President Trump himself will join the meeting–or if the tech executives will meet with others on his behalf. It also remains unclear if the White House, or Trump himself, will press Pichai–as the CEO of Google–on efforts to suppress conservatives particularly Trump’s supporters in the wake of his electoral victory in 2016. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, has not replied to a request for comment on whether the White House will press Google on this matter.
But in recent months a series of reports have emerged that demonstrate that at least some at Google have sought to–with official company resources–wipe out conservatives and Trump supporters.
For instance, in September, Breitbart News uncovered an hourlong internal Google company meeting video in which executives at the company expressed their dismay with the election of President Trump. The meeting, which happened in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, was the company’s first meeting after Trump’s win.
In the explosive video, several top company executives–including Pichai, who is heading to the White House to represent the company on Thursday–are seen and heard bashing Trump and his supporters and discussing use of official company resources and new emerging technology to ensure that the result of the 2016 election is not repeated. As Breitbart News’ Allum Bokhari reported back in September:
Co-founder Sergey Brin can be heard comparing Trump supporters to fascists and extremists. Brin argues that like other extremists, Trump voters were motivated by “boredom,” which he says in the past led to fascism and communism.
The Google co-founder then asks his company to consider what it can do to ensure a “better quality of governance and decision-making.”
VP for Global Affairs Kent Walker argues that supporters of populist causes like the Trump campaign are motivated by “fear, xenophobia, hatred, and a desire for answers that may or may not be there.”
Later, Walker says that Google should fight to ensure the populist movement – not just in the U.S. but around the world – is merely a “blip” and a “hiccup” in a historical arc that “bends toward progress.”
CEO Sundar Pichai states that the company will develop machine learning and A.I. to combat what an employee described as “misinformation” shared by “low-information voters.”
But that’s not all. A deluge of internal company documents and emails have demonstrated just how widespread these efforts have truly become–and how the company literally went down to a granular level to influence get-out-the-vote efforts for matters they thought would help Democrats. An email chain discussing a “silent donation” meant to influence the 2016 election on behalf of Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton by coordinating get-out-the-vote exercises with a group called Voto Latino surfaced back in September as well. In the emails, dated immediately after the 2016 election, another Google executive details how she thought the effort to increase Hispanic turnout would help Clinton win–but she was shocked that Trump won a larger-than-expected share of Hispanic voters, thereby winning the presidency. Pichai, Google’s CEO, is again mentioned in these emails, as Breitbart News reported back in September.
Since then, other reports have surfaced detailing the company’s ongoing discussions about trying to destroy conservatives and Trump supporters. In one such example, just this past week, a report in the Daily Caller detailed how Google executives discussed in internal communications burying the Daily Caller and Breitbart News in search results.
Google has generally avoided discussing this matter honestly, and Republicans may have already paid a significant price for slow action on this front. Researcher Dr. Robert Epstein says evidence show that Google’s actions may have altered and interfered with the results of the 2018 midterm elections, where Democrats retook the majority in the U.S. House of Representatives for the first time in nearly a decade–and won key Senate seats in places like Arizona and Nevada, taking away GOP seats. The Republicans did end up holding–and bolstering–their Senate majority thanks to wins in places like Indiana, North Dakota, Missouri, and Florida, but Democrats far exceeded expectations on election day.
When asked during an interview on Breitbart News Sunday if he found “irregularities” in the 2018 midterm elections with regard to Google’s activities, Epstein replied “yes.”
“I can tell you now, on the record… Yes, I did,” Epstein said. “I did this secretly in 2016, capturing around 13,000 election-related searches on Google, Bing, and Yahoo, and this time I captured about 40,000 election-related searches on Google, Bing, and Yahoo, so yes I did.”
Some Republicans have started looking at finding a way to counter Google’s interference in U.S. elections. For instance, current House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy–who will be the House Minority Leader in the new Congress when Democrats take over there–has called for congressional hearings in the wake of the various exposes on things like the Google video and emails. McCarthy hammered big tech in an oped for Breitbart News back in June, too, and has done multiple interviews standing up to the powers-that-be in Silicon Valley.
It remains to be seen what happens next, but a lot depends on what happens at the White House on Thursday.
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