Trump 2020 Advisory Board Member Shaffer Defends Tulsi Gabbard’s Right To Sue Google

July 30, 2019(EIRNS)—Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer (ret.), a member of Trump’s 2020 Advisory Board, defended Democratic presidential pre-candidate Tulsi Gabbard’s decision to file a $50 million suit against Google on grounds of censorship. Google shut down Gabbard’s advertising account for hours immediately after the first Democratic presidential debate, in which her tenacious attack on “regime change wars” gained her enormous national attention.

“I know Tulsi personally. I don’t always agree with her policies but this is clearly Google trying to put their hand on the scale at a critical time,” Shaffer told Hill.TV yesterday.

“She was definitely in a position to make a lot of money, and the idea of her being at a critical moment—essentially for her First Amendment right being taken away—was something that she had every right to go after them.”

Shaffer is the retired military counterintelligence officer, who became famous in 2005 for his exposure of the Pentagon data-mining program known as Able Danger, and whose memoirs of U.S. secret operations in Afghanistan, Operation Dark Heart, had its entire first run purchased and destroyed by the Defense Department in 2010. He twice joined the late Rep. Walter Jones, EIR, other retired military, and constitutional lawyers in press conferences on Capitol Hill, in (first) insisting that the Constitutional mandate for Congress to declare war be adhered to (2011), and (second) opposing U.S. military operations in Syria (2012).

Gabbard served for a 12-month tour in the Iraq War, and a second tour in Southwest Asia, holds the rank of Major in the Army National Guard.