Google’s Washington Insider

Susan Molinari, Google’s chief Washington lobbyist, has vowed never to let Washington surprise Google.

A brassy, well-connected New York Republican who served seven years in the House, Molinari is paid handsomely to broaden the tech giant’s support beyond Silicon Valley Democrats and to lavish money and attention on selected Republicans. (Google employees gave 90 percent of their political donations to President Obama last year.) If she needs motivation, it occasionally comes from Microsoft, where the former Clinton operative Mark Penn oversaw an ad campaign portraying Google as a nefarious invader of privacy, which helped to keep the pressure on regulators to hold Google under the microscope. To fight off the now constant scrutiny of Google as a behemoth monopoly that reaches far into people’s personal lives, Molinari has aggressively courted lawmakers and federal regulators as she has managed a Google effort that spent a record $18.2 million on lobbying in 2012. The company that once had no use for Washington is now the eighth-biggest spender on lobbying in the capital, ahead of not only Microsoft but also mainstays like Lockheed Martin.