So far, high-profile Silicon Valley venture capitalist and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel isn't saying publicly why he gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to the campaign of a state attorney general who's just launched an antitrust probe of Google.

But it's not the first time Thiel has handed cash to an AG who went after Google over monopoly concerns.

Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley announced Nov. 13 that his office was investigating Google to see if the Mountain View tech giant had violated the state's antitrust and consumer-protection laws. The Missouri attorney general said he had issued an investigative subpoena to Google. He's looking at the firm's handling of users' personal data, along with claims that it misappropriated content from rivals and pushed down competitors' websites in search results.

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the Missouri action and Thiel's support of Hawley.

The company has been at the center of controversy over whether some of America's most successful tech companies are monopolies and should be regulated or broken up. A New York Times op-ed in April asked, "Is It Time to Break Up Google?"

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