Last week, the Media Research Center released results of a study comparing Google results for a search on Vice President Kamala Harris and the 2024 presidential election with a search for former President Donald Trump and the election. The MRC not only found that Harris's official website got higher placement than Trump's in search results but that news articles in each search were overwhelmingly favorable to Harris in her results while Trump's featured openly critical articles.

Media Research Center founder Brent Bozell summed this up succinctly, charging Google with trying to "stack the deck in favor of Kamala Harris." A few days after the revelation, Trump took to Truth Social to demand that the Justice Department investigate Google and prosecute any wrongdoing it may find. Predictably, a Google press representative dismissed the MRC study as flawed and denied using the search engine for electioneering.

If so, I wonder, why did Google Search turn up dramatically different results for my search on an article critical of the Biden-Harris Administration the day after Trump's complaint than it had the day before?

After the second assassination attempt on Trump, my article "How to restore trust in the Secret Service" was published in these pages a few weeks ago. Because I post links to my articles on social media sites, I turned to Google to copy the web address for the piece. I used my standard search terms consisting of my name in quotation marks and the article's keywords, in this case "secret service."

Google told me there were no results. Convinced I might have miskeyed something, I reentered the search terms. Again, Google claimed there was nothing to match my search.

I then entered "Washington Examiner" and my name, and voila! Up popped the article. I clicked on it, copied the web address, cut and pasted it into my social media posts, and added the link to a file I keep of links to my published work. I then went on about my day and forgot about it until the following morning.

I awakened with a gnawing feeling that maybe something in my article had triggered some government agency or another to suppress the piece. The article opened with my own experience working with the Secret Service to secure a presidential rally site from sniper fire during the 1988 presidential election. It contained a concise paragraph summarizing how the Secret Service secures a site.

I reread the paragraph carefully. There was nothing classified in it. The same protocols had appeared in many articles following the Butler, Pennsylvania, assassination attempt. There was nothing there to explain a blackout. Still, maybe one official's ire had been raised.

I tried the identical Google search I'd used the day before. The results were the same. Google claimed there were no matches for my search terms. But if I already knew exactly where the article had been published and who the author was, Google was willing to oblige me by putting my name and Washington Examiner pieces on the top of my search results.

Could the government be so inept as to suppress my piece without making it really impossible to find? Given the recent revelations about the assassination attempts and handling of the border crisis, the answer is clearly yes. Although during the COVID-19 panic-demic, the government was fairly effective at manhandling Silicon Valley into suppressing and silencing critics.

"How to restore trust in the Secret Service" was highly critical of the Secret Service and skeptical toward Biden-Harris administration higher-ups who might be deliberately thwarting the provision of adequate security to Trump. While it seemed unlikely that my article would be singled out specifically given the number of critical pieces about the Secret Service that have been published, I have been informed by federal security officials in the past that my articles have fallen under their scrutiny. It's one reason I curtailed my investigative reporting.

I tried the Google search using my name and "Secret Service" a couple more times as September went by. Google still maintained there were no matches, even though I'd posted the article to social media.

Then, the day after Trump's demand for a Justice Department investigation, Google suddenly changed its tune. My article for the Washington Examiner appeared at the top of a quite long list of other articles I'd published, the majority of them on intelligence issues. It turns out that googling my name with the search term "secret service" turns up 14 pages of results.

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A good spy friend who is now no longer with us used to tell me that "sometimes a coincidence is just a coincidence."

But if Google's search algorithm suppresses articles such as mine that are critical of the Biden-Harris administration in the final months before a presidential election, I'm inclined to believe it can hardly be a coincidence. After all, the Media Research Center has documented 41 cases in which Google interfered in elections since Barack Obama was the Democratic presidential nominee in 2008.