And he did so in his capacity as a private citizen, not by exercising his influence at Google. By the way, we are quite far afield from the initial claim that Google employees wrote software for a particular political campaign.

> And he did so in his capacity as a private citizen, not by exercising his influence at Google. By the way, we are quite far afield from the initial claim that Google employees wrote software for a particular political campaign.

Google has been providing free services to campaigns it wants to help for over a decade, in the open. This started when Schmidt was CEO.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB118489524982572543

The Obama campaign was the first to really realize the importance of IT infrastructure, _and_ their whole shtick (more or less neoliberalism with a friendly face) aligns really well with Google's political goals.

I'm not really sure why you seem to think that this is some conspiracy theory, when everyone involved is openly talking about it.

Nothing in that article corroborates any of the claims mentioned by others above. I notice that the farther down in the thread this conversation goes, the more watered down the accusations of political meddling get. Next you’ll criticize Google for letting campaigns use Gmail or something.

Board members are not company employees, and Eric Schmidt is not a Google engineer as GP claimed. This is a stretch even by conspiracist standards.

Schmidt was the CEO of Google during the first Obama campaign in 2008, and during most of the ramp up to the 2012 campaign.