Interesting article of a snippet from Assange's book about what he thinks of Google's role in the government.

https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/

QuoteEric Schmidt is an influential figure, even among the parade of powerful characters with whom I have had to cross paths since I founded WikiLeaks. In mid-May 2011 I was under house arrest in rural Norfolk, about three hours' drive northeast of London. The crackdown against our work was in full swing and every wasted moment seemed like an eternity. It was hard to get my attention. But when my colleague Joseph Farrell told me the executive chairman of Google wanted to make an appointment with me, I was listening.

        In some ways the higher echelons of Google seemed more distant and obscure to me than the halls of Washington. We had been locking horns with senior US officials for years by that point. The mystique had worn off. But the power centers growing up in Silicon Valley were still opaque and I was suddenly conscious of an opportunity to understand and influence what was becoming the most influential company on earth. Schmidt had taken over as CEO of Google in 2001 and built it into an empire.

        I was intrigued that the mountain would come to Muhammad. But it was not until well after Schmidt and his companions had been and gone that I came to understand who had really visited me.

When I heard there were suspected sexual allegations, "Why did was Schmidt demoted instead of fired?" - pretty hard to can the "visionary & brains" of the operation when there's still work undone.  Worst case would be Schmidt goes somewhere else, or does a new startup.

So... What's this?   Why would Schmidt have expected something like this from Assange?

QuoteI asked Eric Schmidt to leak US government information requests to WikiLeaks, and he refused, suddenly nervous, citing the illegality of disclosing Patriot Act requests. And then as the evening came on it was done and they were gone, back to the unreal, remote halls of information empire, and I was left to get back to my work.
That was the end of it, or so I thought.

OK, so maybe the question really is, why the visit under the guise of "writing a book", well, Schmidt did bring a CFR friend...  is this an "Ah-HA!" moment?

QuoteTwo months later, WikiLeaks' release of State Department cables was coming to an abrupt end. For three-quarters of a year we had painstakingly managed the publication, pulling in over a hundred global media partners, distributing documents in their regions of influence, and overseeing a worldwide, systematic publication and redaction system, fighting for maximum impact for our sources.

Again, why was Schmidt interested in WIKI leaks?

QuoteIt was at this point that I realized Eric Schmidt might not have been an emissary of Google alone. Whether officially or not, he had been keeping some company that placed him very close to Washington, DC, including a well-documented relationship with President Obama. Not only had Hillary Clinton's people known that Eric Schmidt's partner had visited me, but they had also elected to use her as a back channel. While WikiLeaks had been deeply involved in publishing the inner archive of the US State Department, the US State Department had, in effect, snuck into the WikiLeaks command center and hit me up for a free lunch. Two years later, in the wake of his early 2013 visits to China, North Korea, and Burma, it would come to be appreciated that the chairman of Google might be conducting, in one way or another, "back-channel diplomacy" for Washington.

BINGO!

OK, what's the big f-ing deal then, Google does a little "government contract work", right?

QuoteGoogle Ideas is bigger, but it follows the same game plan. Glance down the speaker lists of its annual invite-only get-togethers, such as "Crisis in a Connected World" in October 2013. Social network theorists and activists give the event a veneer of authenticity, but in truth it boasts a toxic piñata of attendees: US officials, telecom magnates, security consultants, finance capitalists, and foreign-policy tech vultures like Alec Ross (Cohen's twin at the State Department).33 At the hard core are the arms contractors and career military: active US Cyber Command chieftains, and even the admiral responsible for all US military operations in Latin America from 2006 to 2009. Tying up the package are Jared Cohen and the chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt.34
        I began to think of Schmidt as a brilliant but politically hapless Californian tech billionaire who had been exploited by the very US foreign-policy types he had collected to act as translators between himself and official Washington—a West Coast–East Coast illustration of the principal-agent dilemma.35
        I was wrong.

Two things to keep in mind always:
a.  You don't get rich being stupid, unless you're business is comedy.
b.  Power & Control is like a rare earth magnet - once connected, impossible to separate.   (Money of course is the magnetism)

QuoteThere was nothing politically hapless about Eric Schmidt. I had been too eager to see a politically unambitious Silicon Valley engineer, a relic of the good old days of computer science graduate culture on the West Coast. But that is not the sort of person who attends the Bilderberg conference four years running, who pays regular visits to the White House, or who delivers "fireside chats" at the World Economic Forum in Davos.43 Schmidt's emergence as Google's "foreign minister"—making pomp and ceremony state visits across geopolitical fault lines—had not come out of nowhere; it had been presaged by years of assimilation within US establishment networks of reputation and influence.

It does not matter who is in the White House, but we currently have a problem, Donald Trump, the rest is still there, idling in Neutral, IMO.
Enjoy what we got, while we got it, they'll be more careful the next time - and probably a bit less "tolerant" of failure.
If that sounds far-fetched, ask yourself, where/why the media considers these protests (with pre-made signs), "Resist", etc., as "grass roots"

A President Donald Trump does not fit this plan.

QuoteSchmidt fits exactly where he is: the point where the centrist, liberal, and imperialist tendencies meet in American political life. By all appearances, Google's bosses genuinely believe in the civilizing power of enlightened multinational corporations, and they see this mission as continuous with the shaping of the world according to the better judgment of the "benevolent superpower."

(my emphasis)
Idling in Neutral, interrupted, sidetracked, waiting in the wings - the mission remains... and America doesn't need to be at the head of it, leave that to the really smart people. 

Still, there's data to be collected... when the right guy is re-seated in the White House, well, you know... Google is just being helpful.

QuoteGoogle is "different". Google is "visionary". Google is "the future". Google is "more than just a company". Google "gives back to the community". Google is "a force for good".
        Even when Google airs its corporate ambivalence publicly, it does little to dislodge these items of faith.45 The company's reputation is seemingly unassailable. Google's colorful, playful logo is imprinted on human retinas just under six billion times each day, 2.1 trillion times a year—an opportunity for respondent conditioning enjoyed by no other company in history.46 Caught red-handed last year making petabytes of personal data available to the US intelligence community through the PRISM program, Google nevertheless continues to coast on the goodwill generated by its "don't be evil" doublespeak. A few symbolic open letters to the White House later and it seems all is forgiven. 

(my emphasis)

A bit of the article goes anti-military, boarder-less, anti-war - perspective, as I see it - as one ought to expect from an non-American.
The real revelation is confirming what each one of us suspects, "Google is watching YOU!"
The second revelation a bit more startling, and not really brought out, "Google wants to be the ONLY ONE watching you."


If you're looking for another reason why the establishment HATES Donald Trump as POTUS, and I believe the MSM wouldn't care about him at all, were he not POTUS...  here is is.  POTUS Trump is that aberration, strange anomaly, the ripple in the program, nobody expected. 
Trump would have been OK, had he just left well enough alone, and just "rode the WH seat" while the machine kept churning. 

If public opinion ever gets firmly behind Trump's MAGA, as the Establishment fears the most, too many of these Establishment players, placed by Obama, will just "age out" and retire.  POTUS Trump is starting to close those windows of opportunity.  I suspect, Hillary was expected to become the catalyst and/or trigger for permanent change.

Lucky for us!