Those conversations — revealed in court filings and documents released by the committee — have become a hot-button issue on the right, seen as evidence of collusion between Big Tech and Democrats to suppress critiques of Covid-19 policies and questions about the 2020 election results.

A lawsuit on the same topic by several red-state attorneys general is now in front of the Supreme Court.

Wednesday marked the first appearance of actual former Biden officials in a hearing: Rob Flaherty, a key White House communications figure who is now Biden’s deputy campaign manager, and Andy Slavitt, the administration’s former head of Covid-19 response.

Jordan immediately went on the attack, accusing Flaherty and Slavitt of coercion, showcasing images of emails they sent to Facebook employees to remove what they claimed was misinformation around Covid-19.

He referred to an email the committee received from Facebook, in which Flaherty allegedly said, “My bias is to kick people off the platform.”

“The White House is telling a social media platform — one of the biggest ones in the world — you should kick people off your platform if they’re saying things we don’t like,” Jordan said.

Flaherty and Slavitt denied the charges of coercion.

“There were no threats, and there were no consequences,” Flaherty said.

“We had no intention in coercing any social media companies into taking any action,” Slavitt said. “We never received any indication that our dialogue ever was interpreted that way. I want to be clear that they made their own decisions.”

Since empaneling the Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government last January, Jordan has spent more than a year in probes of issues like the FBI’s investigations of Jan. 6 rioters and the alleged federal use of AI to quash conservative speech. But six of the nine hearings have focused on allegations of the Biden administration’s collusion with Big Tech to censor speech.

The tech-platform collusion hearings have run in parallel with a related Supreme Court case, Murthy v Missouri, which lost some altitude last month when justices rained skepticism on some of its basic claims about harms and legal standing.

Jordan’s critics — including Democratic members of his committee — were quick to criticize Wednesday’s hearing as a rear-guard effort in a collapsing attention campaign.

“Republicans are holding this hearing today in a last-ditch effort to influence the Supreme Court opinion in the case of Murthy v Missouri,” said the committee’s top Democrat, Del. Stacey Plaskett (D-U.S. Virgin Islands).

Jordan’s committee itself turned into the subject of some of the comments. Plaskett predicted the subcommittee’s $20 million investigation will be a “flop,” comparing it to separate Republican attempts to impeach President Joe Biden.

Plaskett has asked Jordan to make public hundreds of hours of interviews with tech employees and government officials his investigators had conducted. She said in the hearing Wednesday that he refused, only making public two transcribed interviews.

However, the committee did release a 98-page interim staff report after the hearing Wednesday detailing findings from tens of thousands of emails and documents of exchanges between Biden officials and Facebook, YouTube and Amazon, claiming the administration pressured them to censor social media posts and policies on Covid-19 books. The report said the government infringed free speech and violated the First Amendment.

On the substance of the hearing, Flaherty defended the White House’s right to reach out to tech platforms. While he said the companies are the “ultimate decisionmakers” of what goes on their sites, “that does not mean that communication staff cannot ask or even implore those companies to address misinformation on their platforms.”

In an exchange with Flaherty, Jordan asked about an email from a former Biden official to a social media company to take down content “ASAP,” Jordan said.

“That’s not telling the platform what kind of speech can be out there?,” he asked.

“We had the ability to flag whatever we wanted and the platforms had the ability to say no,” Flaherty said.

Jordan tried to use the hearing to spin the issue forward — saying the Biden administration could continue to chill speech ahead of the upcoming election.

After a lower court ruling last July barring government communication with social media — which was ultimately blocked — the White House significantly reduced its outreach to tech companies. Recently, however, the FBI has resumed sharing intelligence about foreign influence campaigns with tech companies, after being stopped following a lower court ruling last year saying such outreach was unconstitutional.

Jordan pointed to those as potential influence operations of their own: “We know the meetings have resumed with foreign influence task force meetings with Big Tech. What are they up to now that’s going to restrict speech and keep important information from the American people? ” he said.

Democrat Dan Goldman (N.Y.) lobbed a counter-charge: that Republican efforts to stop those government briefings would benefit Trump by opening the door to Russian campaigns supporting the former president.

“They want to chill the government from actually interacting with private companies as we come upon an election in November of 2024,” he said.

“If that can’t happen, then Donald Trump and these Republicans benefit because Russia will help them,” Goldman said. “That is why we are here, and that is why this is bogus.”