President Trump said Tuesday he would be watching tech giant Google after a former employee — who was fired for allegedly asking employees to donate to a white supremacist — appeared on Fox News.
Mr. Trump and conservative media have accused the search engine of having an anti-Republican bias, a claim Google has denied. The president tweeted at Google CEO Sundar Pichai after former software engineer Kevin Cernekee told Fox News’ Lou Dobbs he witnessed anti-Trump sentiment among Google’s staff, claiming they wanted to “make sure Trump loses in 2020.”
“@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,” the president 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…in 2020.’ Lou Dobbs stated that this is a fraud on the American public,” he said.
“@peterschweizer stated with certainty that they suppressed negative stories on Hillary Clinton, and boosted negative stories on Donald Ttump. All very illegal. We are watching Google very closely,” the president then tweeted, misspelling his own name and name-dropping a conservative writer.
Mr. Cernekee says he was fired from his former job as an engineer for expressing conservative views on internal message boards.
However, the Daily Caller reported that Mr. Cernekee made a “troubling” request on an internal Google message board, asking employees to help with a “nice gesture” of helping fund a bounty to find the person who punched white supremacist Richard Spencer in 2017, who he described as a “prominent conservative activist.”
Mr. Cernekee said these claims were “false and baseless smears from a jealous and vindictive ex-colleague.”
• Bailey Vogt can be reached at bvogt@washingtontimes.com.
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