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Google Critic Thiel Gave Money to Official Probing Search Giant

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Peter Thiel is Silicon Valley’s contradiction.

Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist who backed Donald Trump’s presidential run, gave $300,000 to a political campaign of Josh Hawley, the Missouri attorney general who opened an antitrust investigation into Google this week.

Hawley, a Republican, unveiled a probe into Alphabet Inc.’s Google for favoring its own products in search results, citing the similar case in the European Union that resulted in a record fine. His subpoena is the only publicly disclosed government antitrust probe against Google in the U.S. since the Federal Trade Commission picked up, then dropped, a competition case in 2013.