Google Chairman Eric Schmidt appears to be playing a brilliant, but dangerously duplicitous game. The difference between Schmidt’s testimony before the Senate Antitrust subcommittee last month and the written answers he provided today suggest a daring PR strategy to avoid an embarrassing video moment.

Last month, the committee chairman, Herb Kohl of Wisconsin asked Schmidt:

“Do recognize that in the words that are used in antitrust kind of oversight, your market share constitutes monopoly, dominant — special power, dominant firm, monopoly firm. Do you recognize you’re — you’re in that area?”

And Schmidt answered:

“I would agree, Senator, that we’re in that area. Again, with apologies because I’m not a lawyer, my understanding of monopoly findings is this is actually a judicial process. So I’d have to let the judges and so forth actually do such a finding. From our perspective, we see ourselves as having a special responsibility to debate all the issues that you are describing with us now. We do understand it.”

Yet, in today’s written response to Senator Blumenthal, Schmidt completely changed his story and tried to prevaricate:

“I would disagree that Google is dominant. By investing smartly, hiring extremely talented engineers, and working very, very hard (and with some good luck), Google has been blessed with a great deal of success. But given the rapid pace of change in the technology industry, we take nothing for granted. As I acknowledged during the Committee hearing, Google is “in the area” of 65% of queries in the U.S., if you look only at Google’s general search competitors, such as Microsoft’s Bing and Yahoo!. In fact, we find that the monthly general search query figures released by comScore and Hitwise don’t reflect the reality of how many sites Google competes with in search.

Eric Schmidt is a brilliant man and it is impossible to believe he “accidentally” admitted to being a dominant firm with special responsibilities during the hearing. Instead, it appears this was a deliberate and cunning strategy. Schmidt didn’t want to make the “Google is NOT dominant” claim and watch an entire panel of senators laugh at him. It would have been fodder for 24 hour news networks, late night tv hosts, and bloggers everywhere. It would have been a devastating public relations blow.

Instead he made one statement in front of the cameras and a completely different one today in a quiet written response to the individual Senators questions. From a public relations perspective, I’m impressed.

Unfortunately for Google, I doubt the Senators will share my sentiments. It appears Google still sees themselves above law and manipulated Senators for their PR goals. That will not go over well. Not at all.