Georgia GOP Sen. Kelly Loeffler accepted thousands of dollars from Google donors despite saying she wouldn’t take Big Tech money.
Loeffler, the front-runner in Georgia’s U.S. Senate special election, received just under $10,000 from Google’s NetPAC and some of the tech company’s current and former key federal lobbyists.
NetPAC, a federal political action committee founded in 2006 for Google staff to pool their personal resources for candidates and organizations that share the company’s “common values,” gave $5,000 to Loeffler last December.
Nick Pearson, Google’s senior manager of government affairs, donated $2,000 to Loeffler last winter. Lee Dunn also contributed $2,800 in March. Dunn was Google’s long-term head of outreach, but she gave to the senator when she was the company’s director of cloud policy.
Loeffler’s Google-linked donations are legal and a pittance compared to the monster $17.6 million the partial self-funder raised by June 30 for her multiparty, free-for-all election to stay in the Senate. Her closest fundraising competitor, Democratic Ebenezer Baptist Church senior pastor Raphael Warnock, brought in $4.3 million during the same time period.
Yet the contributions are jarring compared with Loeffler’s rhetoric on Big Tech.
Like many members of her party, Loeffler, a former CEO of Bakkt, which offers a federally regulated Bitcoin market, touted how she’s fought “to stop tech monopolies from silencing conservatives” in ads. She’s criticized her opponents, too, for adopting a “dangerous” stance by “taking the side of Big Tech” on the campaign trail.
But Loeffler hasn’t just been talk. She introduced the Stopping Big Tech Censorship Act in June, which would lift the liability shield protecting companies that restrict constitutionally protected speech. She co-sponsored Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley’s Limiting Section 230 Immunity to Good Samaritans Act as well. That bill would allow people in the United States to sue firms that censor political speech in bad faith.
“I will never be silenced by the swamp and the fake news that want to attack conservative speech,” she told voters last month. “I don’t take money from Big Tech. I speak out against it.”
Loeffler isn’t the only lawmaker tech companies have invested in. Rep. Doug Collins, the ex-top House Judiciary Republican, has accepted more than $222,000 from similar company PACs and employees since 2011, though he hasn’t taken a specific anti-Big Tech pledge. He’s simply promised not to be beholden to the industry.
A spokesman for Loeffler seized on Collins’s record when asked about Loeffler’s.
“While Kelly Loeffler has been the leading voice in the U.S. Senate to hold Big Tech accountable, Doug Collins has taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from Big Tech and slow-walked investigations into their silencing of conservative voices,” he told the Washington Examiner. “Doug Collins is Big Tech’s puppet, and it’s exactly what you would expect from a lobbyist-loving career politician.”
Collin’s spokesman pushed back on Loeffler’s team’s assertion.
“Doug has not received a dime from the industry in this campaign. She took $5,000 from Google before she was even sworn in. Big Tech has found their queen, and her name is Kelly Loeffler,” he said.
Loeffler was appointed to the Senate in January by GOP Gov. Brian Kemp after then-Sen. Johnny Isakson announced his departure from the seat two years before his term was up due to health concerns. She has an average lead of 4.3 percentage points in her 21-person field, according to election prognosticator RealClearPolitics.
If no candidate receives a majority of the vote on Nov. 3, the first- and second-place finishers will contest a Jan. 5 runoff. Collins routinely trails Loeffler in polls while remaining ahead of his Democratic rivals.
