Donald Trump unleashes at Google claiming that search giant lied to him and DID suppress negative stories on Hillary Clinton and warns: ‘We are watching Google very closely!’
- The president tweeted that Google CEO Sundar Pichai was in the Oval Office working hard to explain ‘how much he liked me’
- He claimed that the search giant worked to undermine his 2016 election
- Didn’t offer evidence, but said it pushed for ‘Crooked Hillary’
- Also issued a threat saying he is watching ‘very closely’
- The president misspelled his last name in one of the tweets
President Donald Trump tore into search giant Google and its CEO Tuesday, touting a conspiracy theory that it worked to undermine his 2016 election and saying he was watching the company ‘very closely.’
Trump issued the warning to the tech behemoth amid a legislative push to regulate big tech, and his own repeated claims that forces are arrayed against him in the elections.
Trump began his Twitter blasts on the company by claiming its chief had sought to flatter him, in a likely reference to a meeting last month.
Trump claimed Google’s CEO during a White House meeting was ‘working very hard to explain how much he liked me, what a great job the Administration is doing’
‘@sundarpichai of Google was in the Oval Office working very hard to explain how much he liked me, what a great job the Administration is doing, that Google was not involved with China’s military, that they didn’t help Crooked Hillary over me in the 2016 Election, and that they…are NOT planning to illegally subvert the 2020 Election despite all that has been said to the contrary,’ Trump tweeted.
‘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 [sic]…in 2020,’ Trump continued.
He was referencing a segment on Lou Dobbs’ Fox News broadcast where Cernekee promoted the theory. ‘Lou Dobbs stated that this is a fraud on the American public,’ Trump said. He also touted an appearance by ‘Clinton cash’ author Peter Schweizer,
Sundar Pichai, Chief Executive Officer of Google, met with President Trump last month
Trump has repeatedly claimed Google ‘rigged’ search results to his detriment in 2016
‘@peterschweizer stated with certainty that they suppressed negative stories on Hillary Clinton, and boosted negative stories on Donald Ttump [sic]. All very illegal. We are watching Google very closely!’ Trump wrote. The tweet included a typo when it referenced Trump’s name.
Hours earlier, Trump tweeted out a clip of Schweizer telling Dobbs: ‘They suppressed negative stories about Hillary Clinton and they boosted negative stories about Donald Trump.’ But he also said that in 2016 Google didn’t feel like it had to ‘tip the scale all that much’ and predicted the firm would go ‘all-in’ in 2020.
Last year, Trump issued a similar threat, and claimed the firm’s search results were ‘RIGGED.’ Google issued a statement denying the charge, which online search experts also have shot down. ‘Search is not used to set a political agenda and we don’t bias our results toward any political ideology,’ it said, Bloomberg reported. ‘Every year, we issue hundreds of improvements to our algorithms to ensure they surface high-quality content in response to users’ queries. We continually work to improve Google Search and we never rank search results to manipulate political sentiment.’
During a company meeting immediately after the election, several execs said they had backed Hillary Clinton but sought to reassure employees. Said co-founder Sergey Brin at the meeting: ‘Myself as an immigrant and a refugee, I certainly find the selection deeply offensive and I know many of you do too … I think it’s a very stressful time and conflicts with many of our values.’