Google Visits the Resistance Factory A rough day at the office for the Democrats’ impeachment expert. By James Freeman
https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-visits-the-resistance-factory-11544645372?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=7&cx_tag=collabctx&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s
Some conservative readers may quarrel with today’s headline on the grounds that Google is the resistance factory, given its left-leaning workforce and concerns about potential bias in the Alphabet unit’s search results. But this column is referring to the House Judiciary Committee in the 116th Congress, which is expected to be chaired by Rep. Jerry Nadler (D., N.Y.)
Mr. Nadler is now the lead Democrat on Judiciary after mounting a successful campaign to persuade his liberal colleagues that he’s the most qualified pol to manage an impeachment. Immediately after November’s elections, Mollie Hemingway of the Federalist reported overhearing Mr. Nadler on a train discussing potential impeachments of both President Trump and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Voters might hope that a reasonable and responsible elected official would not proceed to impeachment discussions without first laying out specific allegations of high crimes and misdemeanors and supporting evidence. Americans are still waiting for such evidence when it comes to Democratic claims of Trump collusion with Russians, but Mr. Nadler claims to see a broad conspiracy.
The strategy for politicians like Mr. Nadler is to try to persuade the public that the Russian government’s attempts to meddle in our democratic process—which unfortunately the Kremlin has been doing for most of our lives—were so powerful in 2016 and so focused on helping Mr. Trump that they actually swayed the election. Part of the strategy involves convincing people that the Russians ran a significant disinformation campaign via American digital media companies.
But a Tuesday meeting of the House Judiciary committee may not have gone exactly as Mr. Nadler had planned. The witness was Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Here’s a partial transcript:
NADLER: Does Google now know the full extent to which its online platforms were exploited by Russian actors in the election two years ago?
PICHAI: We have — you know we undertook a very thorough investigation, and in 2016, we — we now know that there were two main ad accounts linked to Russia, which — which you know, advertised on Google for about $4,700 in advertising.
We also found other limited…
NADLER: Total of $4,700?
PICHAI: That’s right, which was, you know — no amount is OK here, but we found limited activity, improper activity. We learned a lot from that and we have, you know, dramatically increased the protections we have around our election offerings.
Leading up to the current elections, we did — we again found limited activity, both from the Internet Research Agency in Russia, as well as accounts linked to Iran. CONTINUE AT SITE
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