The White House is keeping a close eye on Google amid reports that the company is working with the Chinese Communist Party’s military and allegedly interfering in the U.S. presidential elections, both in 2016 and in the upcoming 2020 election.
Trump said Pichai denied that Google was involved with China’s military and denied helping then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in the 2016 elections. He said Pichai assured him they are “not” planning to subvert the 2020 elections, “despite all that has been said to the contrary.”
“It all sounded good until I watched Kevin Cernekee, a Google engineer, say terrible things about what they did in 2016 and that they want to ‘Make sure that Trump losses in 2020,’” Trump continued.
“Lou Dobbs stated that this is a fraud on the American public. Peter Schweizer stated with certainty that they suppressed negative stories on Hillary Clinton, and boosted negative stories on Donald Trump.
“All very illegal,” Trump added. “We are watching Google very closely!”
A Google spokesman rejected Cernekee’s claims in an Aug. 6 email to The Epoch Times.
Election Interference
A current Google employee was caught on hidden camera in June by Project Veritas saying that the company’s goal, in some of its efforts, was preventing Trump or anybody like him from getting elected again.“It’s one thing to show the power that search results have, but in the project, we showed that Google search results actually did favor one candidate,” he said.
Chinese Military
In March, the United States’ top general testified that China’s military is benefiting from the work Google is doing in the communist country.“We watch with great concern when industry partners work in China knowing that there is that indirect benefit,” he said. “Frankly, ‘indirect’ may be not a full characterization of the way it really is, it is more of a direct benefit to the Chinese military.”
James Andrew Lewis, senior vice president and director of the Technology Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told The Epoch Times in an Aug. 6 email, “All companies have to rethink research relations with China given Beijing’s increasing hostility.”
“Right now, what Google is doing in China is not illegal,” Lewis said. “That may change as the administration tightens export controls.”
Google said in 2018 that it no longer plans to acquire a $10 billion cloud-computing contract with the U.S. Defense Department. Google said that part of the reason why it stopped competing for the contract was because of new ethical guidelines that it said don’t align with the project, according to Reuters.