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Citing No Evidence, Trump Claims Google Search Results Are ‘Rigged’ Against Him, Repeats Debunked Claim First Made In Russian State Media

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WASHINGTON, August 28, 2018 — President Donald Trump on Tuesday accused Google’s search engine of suppressing conservative news stories and other “fair” news stories about him, repeating a discredited claim first made in a debunked Russian propaganda article.

“Google search results for “Trump News” shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake New Media. In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD. Fake CNN is prominent. Republican/Conservative & Fair Media is shut out. Illegal?” the president wrote.

A short time later, he added: “96% of results on “Trump News” are from National Left-Wing Media, very dangerous. Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good. They are controlling what we can & cannot see. This is a very serious situation-will be addressed!”

Google reacts to Trump statement

In a statement on Tuesday, a Google spokesperson flatly denied the president’s claims, citing the company’s goal of making sure users “receive the most relevant answers” to their queries “in a matter of seconds.”

“Search is not used to set a political agenda and we don’t bias our results toward any political ideology. 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.”

Frequent criticism of big tech and social media giants

Mr. Trump and other Republicans have frequently accused Google, Facebook, Twitter and other large technology companies of deliberately acting to censor or suppress content targeted at conservatives. Such accusations are beginning to become more common in conservative media.

In July, he accused Twitter of “shadow-banning” prominent conservatives. After Facebook and other platforms banned conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, Trump tweeted that “Social Media is totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices.”

Republican members of Congress have also frequently complained about so-called “censorship” by social media companies, usually in the form of banning or suspending users for content that violates their terms of service.

Diamond and Silk weigh in on alleged censorship on Facebook

When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified about Russian interference in the 2016 election before the House and Senate earlier this year, many Republicans in both chambers used the opportunity to question him about claims by Lynette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson, YouTube personalities better known as Diamond and Silk.

Hardaway and Richardson claimed Facebook employees had censored their Facebook page for being “unsafe to the community,” but the duo has never produced any documentary evidence to support that claim.

Another frequent target for these attacks has been Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who is expected to face similar accusations to Zuckerberg when he appears before Congress next month.

Trump accused Google of favoring Clinton during the 2016 campaign

Tuesday’s twitter eruption was not the first time Trump has accused Google of manipulating search results to his detriment. At a September 2016 campaign rally in Waukesha, Wisconsin, he alleged that Google’s search results were biased in favor of Hillary Clinton.

Graphic for the discredited Sputnik story accusing Google of manipulating searches against Trump, which he first cited in the closing months of the 2016 campaign.

Graphic for the discredited Sputnik story accusing Google of manipulating searches against Trump, which he first cited in the closing months of the 2016 campaign.

Trump told rally attendees that “Google search engine was suppressing the bad news about Hillary Clinton.”

That claim appears to be based on a widely-debunked story published by Sputnik, a Russian state-owned media outlet. Although the Russian government says Sputnik is no different from Voice of America, Al Jazeera or other state-owned news organizations, American intelligence officials found the outlet played a major role in Russia’s campaign to influence the 2016 election.

The story cited a video which accused Google of manipulating its autocomplete function to suggest positive search queries about Mrs. Clinton and negative ones about Mr. Trump. However, the choices presented in Google’s auto-complete function are based on the most popular searches made by users and not on any input from the company.

Trump administration apparently considering action against Google

Regardless of whether Trump’s claims of censorship are without merit, it appears he has ordered action to be taken against Google. National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow told reporters that the Trump administration is looking into the search giant.

“We’ll let you know, we’re taking a look at it,” Kudlow said Tuesday while speaking near the White House’s North Lawn.

“We’re just going to do some investigation and analysis,” he added later when asked to clarify what “taking a look at it” meant.

Asked whether he was aware that Trump’s accusations appeared to be rooted in a discredited Russian propaganda story, Kudlow said that particular issue “is above [his] pay grade.”

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Andrew Feinberg covers the White House, Capitol Hill, and anywhere else news happens for BeltwayBreakfast.com and BroadbandBreakfast.com. He has reported on policy and politics in the nation's capital since 2007, and his writing has appeared in publications like The Hill, Politico, Communications Daily, Silicon Angle, and Washington Business Journal. He has also appeared on both daytime and prime radio and television news programs on NPR, Sirius-XM, CNN, MSNBC, ABC (Australia), Al Jazeera, NBC Digital, Voice of America, TV Rain (Russia) and CBS News. Andrew wishes he could say he lives in Washington, DC with his dog, but unfortunately, he lives in a no-dogs building in suburban Maryland.

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White House

Despite Efforts To Calm Americans’ Fears, Trump’s Coronavirus Approval Drops

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Vice President Mike Pence greets sailors on the hospital ship USNS Comfort

President Donald Trump’s response to the novel coronavirus outbreak in the United States is leaving Americans less than impressed.

A Morning Consult poll released Tuesday shows less than half of voters surveyed — 49 percent — approve of the president’s approach to dealing with the threat posed by the virus’ spread in the US.

The results of that poll, taken from February 28 to March 1, showed a marked drop from the 56 percent of voters who said they approved of Trump’s actions when surveyed from February 24 to February 26th, a decline caused by a 9-point drop in independents approving of his performance, as well as a 7-point drop among Democrats.

The same February 28-March 1 poll showed the number of voters who disapprove rising to 37 percent, which leaves the president’s net approval on the coronavirus issue at 12 points. That’s less than one third of what it was three weeks ago.

The president’s declining approval numbers on coronavirus come despite his attempts to project calm during two press conferences last week, during which he attacked Democrats for supposedly politicizing the issue.

Trump also tried to stem discontent in the financial markets by putting Vice President Mike Pence in charge of coordinating his administration’s response to the outbreak.

But Pence has a checkered history when it comes to public health matters. As governor of Indiana in 2015, the future Vice President presided over an outbreak of HIV — the virus that causes AIDS — among intravenous drug users that saw over 200 people infected.

Although Pence was advised by public health experts to declare a public health emergency and issue emergency regulations to allow needle exchanges to operate in Indiana (which bans them).

Citing his own belief that needle exchange programs encourage drug use (a belief which is contradicted by most public health experts), Pence refused to allow any such emergency measures until roughly two months after the outbreak peaked, when he approved an exchange which would operate for 30 days.

In 2018, Yale University epidemiologists found that the outbreak could have been stemmed had Pence and other state officials acted faster.

“Our findings suggest that with earlier action the actual number of infections recorded in Scott County — 215 — might have been brought down to fewer than 56, if the state had acted in 2013, or to fewer than 10 infections, if they had responded to the [hepatitis C] outbreak in 2010-2011,” the study’s lead author, Forrest W. Crawford, said at the time. “Instead, they cut funding for the last HIV testing provider in the county.”

Another of the paper’s authors, Yale University’s Gregg Gonsalves, tweeted on Wednesday that Trump’s decision to place Pence in charge of coronavirus response ““speaks to a lack of seriousness by the White House.”

When asked on Saturday whether he and Pence would pledge that politics and ideology would play no role in determining how the Trump administration responds to a coronavirus outbreak, Trump refused to do so.

Speaking in his own defense, Pence downplayed the seriousness of the 2015 outbreak, which he said occurred “in a very small town.”

“I think my experience as a governor, dealing with two different infectious diseases and seeing the vital role that local healthcare providers play, that federal officials play, it has really informed me,” he said.

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White House

Trump’s Attempt To Delay Bolton Book Unlikely To Pass Muster With Courts, Experts Say

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President Trump is personally seeking to block publication of his former national security adviser’s book by asserting that any conversation with him is by its very nature classified.

The heretofore unprecedented theory would prevent Ambassador John Bolton, who served as Trump’s national security adviser until last fall, from publishing his book, “The Room Where It Happened,” until either Trump relents and allows it or a judge intervenes after litigation that would undoubtedly delay the book’s publication until well past its announced March 7 release date.

According to The Washington Post, Trump has told aides that he will endeavor to block the book’s publication on the grounds that his conversations with Bolton are classified in their entirety, no matter the topic.

While the president has broad authority to declare information classified — or to declassify it — an assertion that all conversations between him and his national security advisor are classified would contradict the posture taken by the career National Security Council staff tasked with reviewing the manuscript prior to publication.

In a letter sent last month to Bolton attorney Charles Cooper, NSC records office senior director Ellen Knight warned that Bolton’s book “appear[ed] to contain significant amounts of classified information” which had been deemed top secret, but also maintained that the NSC would assist with revisions to excise that information so as to “move forward as expeditiously as possible.”

Knight, a career official whose role places her in charge of the prepublication review process, told Cooper that NSC staff would “do our best to work with you to ensure your client’s ability to tell his story in a manner that protects U.S. national security.”

Joshua Geltzer, a Georgetown University Law Center visiting professor who served as the NSC’s Senior Director for Counterterrorism from 2015-2017, said an assertion that any conversations between Bolton and the president are per se classified was unlikely to pass legal muster.

“At best, that’s mushing classification together with executive privilege,” he said. “Sometimes people think of [classification] as a form of privilege, but it’s not the same as the privilege that attaches to the communications between the President and his closest advisor.”

Geltzer said he would hope that the career NSC officials who’d normally review Bolton’s book would do their jobs “as they understand them to be best and correctly done,” but conceded that Trump could, in theory, overrule them.

If the President wants to overrule them, he definitely has that authority in many, many areas. But I would hope that their instinct is still to do the job correctly, rather than to do it incorrectly.”

Steven Aftergood, a physicist who heads the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy, said claiming any conversation with the president is classified would be an “unusually aggressive and expansive view of classification,” but said such an assertion would not necessarily pass legal muster because the White House would need to indicate to Bolton what information in the book is classified “with a degree of specificity.”

Knight, Aftergood said, would most likely not tolerate such an abuse of the prepublication review process because she is “a career professional who has spent decades distinguishing carefully between what is classified and what is not.”

If Bolton is forced to file suit to ensure publication of his manuscript, Geltzer said judges might not take kindly to such a sweeping declaration of classification in the post-Snowden era.

A judge, he said, could ask for the government to submit an ex parte affidavit — one that is submitted to the court without a copy being seen by the other side — explaining why certain information has been deemed classified at a level that disclosure would cause “grave harm” to national security.

But forcing Bolton to take the White House to court could backfire, he explained.

“Are they really going to claim that John Bolton, a hard, right conservative, is trying to jeopardize national security by disclosing classified information? Who is really going to believe that?” he asked.

“Everyone will understand what what game is being played right now if publication is is blocked, or significantly deferred,” he said. If his book is is delayed for months or longer, everyone will understand that it’s not because of national security reasons, but because of political ones.”

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Party-Line Votes Stop Schumer’s Subpoena Push

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The Senate has rejected a succession of amendments to the rules governing President Trump’s impeachment trial which would direct Chief Justice John Roberts to issue subpoenas to the White House and several executive branch agencies which refused to honor subpoenas issued during the House’s impeachment inquiry.

Senators voted along party lines, 53-47 to table a series of amendments offered to the proposed Republican-authored trial rules by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-New York, which would have compelled the White House, the State Department, and the Office of Management and Budget to produce documents for the Senate to consider as evidence when deciding whether to remove Trump from office for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

Senator Ted Cruz, R-Texas, condemned Democrats for objecting to the “very reasonable proposal” of using a process similar to that used to try President Bill Clinton in 1999.

“This seems to be a time for Adam Schiff and the house managers to attack the president and lecture the American people,” he said.

While speaking to reporters during a break in the trial, Minnesota Democrat Amy Klobuchar hit back against White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, who during part of his arguments on Tuesday remarked that “some of you” (referring to senators who are currently running for the Democratic presidential nomination) “should be in Iowa” rather than sitting in the Senate chamber.

“I’ve made clear from the very beginning that I’ve got to do my constitutional duty,” she said.

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