Sen. Blackburn Asks Google CEO If He Fired an Engineer Who Was Mean to Her

During a Wednesday hearing with U.S. technology company CEOs, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) asked Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai if one of his employees still had a job after criticizing her. Blackburn, staring down her nose at her computer screen, asked, “Is Blake Lemoine, one of your engineers, still working with you?” Pichai responded that he was not familiar with the specific person: “I am not sure if he’s currently an employee.” And Blackburn said, “Well, he has had very unkind things to say about me, and I was just wondering if you all had still kept him working there.” Google employs close to 100,000 people. The First Amendment protects American citizens’ freedom of speech and of protest, and defamation law allows for the criticism of public figures like members of Congress in the vast majority cases.