Big tech lobbying causes congresspeople to try to stop the FTC.

The heads of Big Tech companies and their allies in the media are not happy about it. According to the anti-monopoly group American Economic Liberties Project, the Wall Street Journal has published at least 69 op-eds, editorials, or letters criticizing Khan.

On July 13, House Republicans on the Judiciary Committee are holding a hearing with Khan where they are expected to attack her over the FTC’s ongoing investigation into billionaire Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter and the “Twitter Files” journalists who he granted access to internal company documents, among other things.

Big Tech companies like Alphabet and Meta fund many of the conservative advocacy groups that have been going after Khan, including the American Action Forum, Cato Institute, and the National Taxpayers Union Foundation. The companies have also been funding some of Khan’s biggest critics on the Judiciary Committee. We examined the campaign contributions from Big Tech companies, and found that Republicans on the panel have received at least $400,000 from the PACs and employees of Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft, and that at least 11 of them have received donations directly from the companies’ lobbyists or executives.

Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) has been targeting Khan for months. In April, Jordan subpoenaed the FTC for documents related to the agency’s actions in response to Musk’s Twitter takeover. In March, the Judiciary Committee and its Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, which Jordan also chairs, published a report that accuses the FTC of having political motivations behind its Twitter investigation.

Over the course of his career, Jordan has received at least $76,000 from employees and PACs of the five Big Tech companies, including $38,000 that came from the PAC of Google. One of his donations in 2018 came from Adam Kovacevich, who was then the senior director of Alphabet’s federal lobbying team. According to a report from Mother Jones, Kovacevich spearheaded efforts at Google to bolster the company’s relationships with members of the GOP, including by getting the company to sponsor a reception at the Conservative Political Action Conference in order to “court the people who influence” conservative lawmakers. He was also behind the company’s efforts to fund think tanks that would produce reports favorable to Google’s interests, according to the report. Kovacevich has since founded a Big Tech lobbying group called Chamber of Progress that is funded by Google, Uber, Meta, Apple, and other companies, and that has been lobbying Congress against legislation that would limit the ways Big Tech companies could use their market power to gain advantages against competitors and consumers. Kovacevich, a former Democratic staffer, touts his tech industry group as center-left, but he sides with Jordan in opposing antitrust legislation that would reduce the power of Big Tech.

The Judiciary Committee’s second highest-ranking member, Rep. Darrell Issa of California, has joined Jordan in assailing Khan’s tenure at the FTC. Issa recently shared on Twitter a Wall Street Journal op-ed criticizing Khan that was written by a vice president of the conservative lobbying group FreedomWorks. Last month, Issa appeared on Fox Business and described an FTC order blocking a vertical merger of biotech companies Illumina and Grail as potentially “the worst regulatory move ever.” Of all Republicans on the committee, Issa has received the most donations from Big Tech employees and company PACs, with more than $134,000, including $71,000 from Microsoft’s PAC—making the company one of his top PAC contributors—and nearly $34,000 from Google employees. In addition, the tech industry trade group Consumer Technology Association, which in recent years has represented all five Big Tech firms, has been one of Issa’s top career PAC donors, according to OpenSecrets, giving his campaigns $75,000. Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook continue to be “core members” of the trade group.

While Issa has called to investigate what he describes as Big Tech censorship of conservatives, which he claims is the “singular Big Tech crisis of our times,” he rejected the tech platform-focused antitrust legislation that was passed out of the previous Congress’ Judiciary Committee to rein in the market power of giants like Facebook and Google. In June 2021, Issa slammed the tech antitrust push, calling the bills an “unprecedented expansion of big government,” and joined fellow California Republican Tom McClintock—and some Judiciary Committee Democrats from the state—in arguing that the legislation unfairly targeted Apple, Google, and Facebook, among other things. Later in 2021, Issa received a $2,500 contribution from Meta lobbyist Greg Maurer. Maurer, a vice president of public policy for Meta, is a former aide to Republican Speaker John Boehner who joined the company in 2012 as Facebook was stepping up its conservative network in Washington. This year, with Republicans again in control of the committee, Issa has accepted donations from Apple lobbyist Jeff Dobrozsi and Microsoft Competition Policy Counsel Stewart Jeffries. In years past, Issa received $3,000 in donations from former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Chairman Bill Gates.