Lawyer Harmeet Dhillon: ‘Sundar Pichai Lied to Congress’ About Google Practices

Lawyer Harmeet Dhillon discussed Breitbart News’ latest Google leak on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight, Wednesday, highlighting Google’s threat towards democracy.

On Wednesday, Breitbart Tech Senior Reporter Allum Bokhari published details about a leaked Google internal discussion thread, proving the company regularly adds search results, including negative results about prominent left-wing figures, to a blacklist on its platform YouTube.

“The term ‘abortion’ was added to a ‘blacklist’ file for ‘controversial YouTube queries,’ which contains a list of search terms that the company considers sensitive. According to the leak, these include some of these search terms related to: abortion, abortions, the Irish abortion referendum, Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters, and anti-gun activist David Hogg,” Bokhari reported. “The existence of the blacklist was revealed in an internal Google discussion thread leaked to Breitbart News by a source inside the company who wishes to remain anonymous. A partial list of blacklisted terms was also leaked to Breitbart by another Google source.”

After announcing that she would discuss the leak on Tucker Carlson Tonight, Dhillon appeared on Carlson’s show, Wednesday, to warn viewers about the threat Google poses to democracy.

Will be discussing this tonight on @TuckerCarlson @foxnews https://t.co/yYfUug51Z7

— Harmeet K. Dhillon (@pnjaban) January 16, 2019

“Why is nobody covering this? That’s a great question. And this question as well: Google’s manipulation… why isn’t that a violation of campaign finance law? The company’s YouTube blacklist, for example, allegedly suppressed negative videos about Maxine Waters. Why is that not a contribution to Maxine Waters?” asked Carlson on his show. “Harmeet Dhillon, unlike us, is an attorney and she joins us tonight. So, Harmeet, you just saw a guy plead to a felony because he paid off his client’s girlfriend with private funds in the middle of a campaign. That was considered a campaign finance violation. Here you have the most powerful company in the world putting its thumb on the scale on behalf of candidates, but that’s not a campaign contribution? How?”

“Well it is a campaign finance violation, and if anybody thinks that this is some sort of aberration, Google has been doing this and bragging about it internally even in the last election,” Dhillon replied. “One internal person at Google, a manager at Google made a silent campaign contribution by turning out the vote and contributing turn out the vote efforts in several states that were swing states for Hillary Clinton, and specifically targeting Latino voters. I think people should be encouraged to do democratic activities like this, on both sides, and help with elections, but when a corporation does it, with its corporate assets, it needs to be disclosed as a campaign finance violation.”

“Here, you have the one example of Maxine Waters, but let’s just play this out. You have twenty plus Democrats running for the Democratic nomination. If Google decides to bump up the search engine results in a positive way for Beto O’Rourke in response to, for example, ‘Democratic candidates for president 2020,’ and then bump down Tulsi Gabbard or some others for example, that’s going to be a contribution, in my opinion, to those candidates who benefit from it, and a very valuable one,” she explained. “If it isn’t being disclosed as such, then that is a fraud on our democracy. And again, imagine what they’re doing to Donald Trump. They’re already doing it to Republicans as you have previously reported with regard to search engine results for Republican women, for Californian Republican Party, for various other Republicans.”

“This is a particularly shocking and alarming story that we really need to see our members of Congress, Senators, and the White House wake up about this issue, because otherwise, we aren’t going to be talking about a democracy in the next two election cycles,” Dhillon warned. “We’ll be talking about what it used to look like before we let Big Tech take over and control the outcome.”

Tucker then raised the possibility of President Trump even failing to be re-elected if Big Tech continues to influence politics at the current extent, and declared, “I wonder why the White House wouldn’t… they do control the executive branch of government… wouldn’t have been awakened to that.”

Dhillon responded, “We have seen Donald Trump, actually, tweet about this issue in September 2018. He tweeted, practically, about the subject matter of today’s story from Breitbart and people called him a conspiracy theorist, that it isn’t true, when now we see the evidence that they are doing this manipulation. And Sundar Pichai lied to Congress about it.”

“But these companies skilfully spread the money around, not just to members of Congress, but also people working in the administration who are looking for their exit and thinking, well, maybe I’ll work for the other side of tech policy and make a bunch of money advising Google on how to speak conservative to conservatives,” Dhillon concluded. “And that’s how it happens.”