Former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown took $20,000 from Google’s corporate PAC while running campaign ads attacking a Google data center in Ohio — the latest hypocrisy moment for a politician claiming to fight for working families.
The September 4 ad features an Ohioan blaming Republican Sen. Jon Husted for bringing data centers to Ohio and linking their expansion to higher electric bills. The facility featured in the ad opened in Lancaster in 2023. It’s owned by Google.
Campaign finance records show Google’s corporate PAC contributed $20,000 to Brown over his political career. Brown also received thousands of dollars from individuals who lobby for Google — including two whose firms worked on permitting, grid reliability, and energy affordability issues tied to data centers.
“Apparently Google is terrible enough to put in a campaign attack ad, but perfectly acceptable when the political contributions are coming in.”
“That is the contradiction Brown needs to answer,” Mehek Cooke, a GOP strategist and attorney in Ohio, told Fox News Digital. “If Google’s Lancaster investment is so bad for Ohio, why was Google political money acceptable to Sherrod Brown?”
Among the contributors: Google lobbyist Lisa Kountoupes donated $3,500 in March. Google lobbyist Michael D. Smith donated a total of $10,200 to Brown since 2017, according to Federal Election Commission records.
Kountoupes’s firm was hired by Google in December to lobby on issues related to permitting reform tied to the company’s data center needs, Politico previously reported. Smith’s firm, Cornerstone Government Affairs, reported lobbying for Google on “issues related to permitting reform for grid reliability and energy affordability,” according to federal lobbying filings.
FEC records show Brown also received a combined $6,000 over the past decade from three additional Google lobbyists.
Lauren Chou, a spokeswoman for Brown’s campaign, highlighted Brown’s opposition to Ohio’s data center expansion but did not address the Google money.
“Husted is a ‘chief reason’ Ohio has 226 data centers and is ‘the face of data centers’ in Ohio,” Chou said. “Ohioans shouldn’t be forced to subsidize these costs and Ohioans — not Jon Husted and his billionaire friends — should get to decide if data centers are built in their community.”
Cooke accused Brown of acting like his “Google relationship in Washington does not count,” calling it “Jekyll-and-Hyde politics.”
“For nearly five decades, Brown has sold himself as the plaid-shirt, working-class populist,” she said. “He lost in 2024, and now he is back running the same playbook: say one thing to Ohioans while his Washington record tells a very different story.”
Brown, who is seeking to return to the U.S. Senate in the high-stakes race against Husted, was elected in 2006 before losing his reelection bid in 2024 to Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio.
But this isn’t the first time Brown’s comeback campaign has faced questions over conflicting positions.
In 2015, Brown celebrated the construction of an Amazon data center in central Ohio, saying in a press release the new facility “is great news for New Albany and central Ohio.”
Despite his public praise, Brown has become an outspoken critic of Ohio’s growing number of data centers — a defining issue in Ohio politics ahead of the midterms. President Donald Trump has pushed to expand the facilities, warning that communities that block them would “end up being backwards and poor.”
“America is in a global race for AI, computing capacity and energy infrastructure,” Cooke said. “China is not slowing down because American politicians discovered that attacking data centers makes a convenient campaign commercial.”
In a statement to Fox News Digital, Husted campaign spokesperson Amy Natoce said Brown failed Ohio families during his 32 years in Washington and is “once again resorting to lies instead of facing his abysmal record head-on.”
“The House overwhelmingly passed Sen. Husted’s bipartisan legislation requiring data center companies to pay for the power they use, but Senate Democrats blocked it,” Natoce said. “Sherrod Brown and his friends would rather play politics and stick Ohio families with higher electric bills than pass a commonsense solution. It’s despicable.”
