Google Chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt will tomorrow meet for the first time with Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), ranking member of the Senate Judiciary antitrust subcommittee.
The in-person meeting comes just a few weeks ahead of Google’s first antitrust hearing on Sept. 22.
Google reached out to Lee’s office to request the meeting as “an opportunity for them to get to know each other ahead of the hearing,” said Emily Bennion, Lee’s press secretary, in a phone call with TPM’s Idea Lab.
“Senator Lee gets a number of meeting requests from business leaders and others. Whenever we get a request, we do what we can to arrange it so that we can fulfill them,” Bennion added.
Bennion said that she didn’t have a specific time for the meeting, but said that it would take place in Lee’s office in Washington and would “probably be quite brief, ten or fifteen minutes,” she said.
Bennion said she wasn’t sure what topics would be discussed but said that “some of the concerns” about Congress’s antitrust probe into Google would likely come up.
Lee made headlines in March when he became the second Senator, after the Senate antitrust subcommittee’s Chairman Herb Kohl (D-WI) to call for hearings into possible anti-competitive behavior at Google.
Both Senators were incensed when Google initially refused to allow Schmidt to testify before the subcommittee, despite being threatened with a subpoena, but Schmidt quickly reversed course and agreed to testify.
POLITICO first reported the meeting. We’ve has reached out to Kohl’s office to ask if he’ll be meeting with Schmidt as well.
Update: An aide to Kohl says that Schmidt will be meeting with Kohl as well Wednesday.
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