A Punchbowl News “fireside chat” with a key Big Tech executive turned out to be an effective commercial for the most biased titan in the industry: Google.
Punchbowl News featured Google Vice President Lisa Gevelber, founder of “Grow with Google,” and Rep. Laurel Lee (R-FL) in a Tuesday event on “Advancing with AI.” Stunningly, neither Punchbowl News nor Rep. Lee—who is the chair of the Subcommittee on Elections—levied any harsh criticism of the election-interfering behemoth that also controls YouTube, Chrome, Gemini and Android. Instead, the participants treated Google with kid gloves. When Punchbowl News Founder and CEO Anna Palmer asked Lee what artificial intelligence (AI) regulations Congress should prioritize, the congresswoman’s response sounded like a Google talking point.
“How can we get involved in some baseline standard that isn’t going to require, you know, for example: we don’t need to be looking at somebody’s algorithms,” Lee added. “Like, that—that’s not going to be a productive use of Congress.”
MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider was not impressed: “When the most giant bureaucracy, Google, is flatfooted and losing ground, President Joe Biden issued an executive order specifically trying to protect Google and its arcane closed-source AI algorithms in an obvious scheme to help Google catch up with its more innovative competitors,” he said. “I am concerned that Chairwoman Laurel Lee is falling into Google’s trap, and articulating its talking points. Congress must investigate Google for its election interference and determine how it manipulates search and AI algorithms to silence Americans’ constitutionally protected speech and pervert our election systems.”
As chair of the Subcommittee on Elections, Lee is in a position to hold Big Tech giants like Google accountable for their election interference.
Not only did Rep. Lee not confront Google executive Gevelber about Google’s past misdeeds on censorship and election interference, Lee bragged about having another “program in [her] district in partnership with Google” for an “Internet Safety Training.”
Gevelber, meanwhile, praised Lee for her work on a report put out by the House Bipartisan Task Force on Artificial Intelligence. Gevelber may have missed the part of the report that identified “transparency” and “mitigation of harmful bias” as “guiding principles for responsible and trustworthy AI.”
Investigating Google is critically important given its monopoly status—confirmed in at least three recent cases. U.S. District Court Judge Amit P. Mehta ruled in U.S. v. Google in August 2024 that “Google is a monopolist and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.” Google also lost antitrust cases in December 2023 over its app store and again in April 2025 over its dealings in the advertising market.
Disturbingly, Google has wielded its monopoly power to interfere in American politics, as demonstrated by numerous MRC studies. In fact, MRC researchers found in March 2024 that Google interfered in American elections at least 41 times from 2008 to 2024. One later study showed that during the 2024 campaign, Google prioritized negative leftist articles above then-Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump’s website in its search results. Seven additional studies revealed that Google stuffed search pages with left-of-center content when users searched for Trump and then-Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, while leaving only a paucity of right-of-center articles. These studies demonstrated that users would have to go through multiple pages of search results to find a U.S.-based right-of-center news article.
Google’s meddling didn’t stop when Harris’s presidential campaign ended. Six more MRC studies found that the tech giant also rigged search results against Trump’s key nominees, frequently leaving nominees like now-Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth without a single right-of-center result.
Additionally, MRC researchers confirmed that Gemini, the AI chatbot created by Google, had severe racial bias in February 2024. Gemini repeatedly refused to create images of white people while obliging similar requests for people of other races.
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