A newly revealed tranche of emails between Google executives reportedly details how the company supported rides for Hispanic voters in the 2016 election, which one executive characterized as being an effort to boost turnout for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
According to an email chain between Google executives obtained by Fox News’ Tucker Carlson and Breitbart News, Google’s Multicultural Marketing development head Eliana Murillo sent out an email the day after the 2016 election detailing that Google had “supported partners like Voto Latino to pay for rides to the polls in key states,” which she characterized as a “silent donation.”
“We even helped them create ad campaigns to promote the rides (with support from HOLA folks who rallied and volunteered their time to help),” Murillo said. “We supported Voto Latino to help them land an interview with Sen. Meza of Arizona (key state for us) to talk about the election and how to use Google search to find information about how to vote. They were a strong partner, among many in this effort.”
“Ultimately, after all was said and done, the Latino community did come out to vote, and completely surprised us,” Murillo wrote in the email. “We never anticipated that 29% of Latinos would vote for Trump. No one did. We saw headlines like this about early voter turn out and thought that this was finally the year that the ‘sleeping giant’ had awoken.”
Murillo noted that 71 percent of Latinos voted for Clinton and that “that wasn’t enough.” She said that despite efforts to remain “objective,” that Trump’s win was “devastating for our Democratic Latino community.”
[Opinion: Google News is heavily biased – but it’s not rigged]
Carlson condemned what he saw in the emails on his Monday evening show, claiming it was an attempt to influence the election in favor of Clinton.
“It was aimed only at one group, a group that Google cynically assumed would vote exclusively for the Democratic Party,” Carlson said. “Furthermore, this mobilization effort targeted not only the entire country but swing states vital to the Hillary campaign. This was not an exercise in civics, this was political consulting. It was in effect an in-kind contribution to the Hillary Clinton campaign.”
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Washington Examiner.
Carlson said that Google had told him the emails were not the official position of the company. “Their only defense was that the activities they described were either nonpartisan or were not officially taken by the company,” Carlson said.
“But of course they were both,” he added. “Plenty of people in Google knew what was going on and we haven’t seen any evidence anyone at Google disapproved of it and tried to rein it in.”
Trump has been critical of Google among other technology companies. Last month, he accused the company of promoting former President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address on Google’s homepage, but not his own State of the Union in 2018 nor his speech before a joint session of Congress in February 2017.
Google rejected Trump’s claims, and said that the algorithms that power Google are constantly updated to ensure that the highest-quality results emerge, regardless of perspective.
