House GOP to investigate whether White House pressured tech companies to suppress conservatives

House Republicans plan to create a new subcommittee this week to investigate communications between major tech companies and the Biden administration, a source familiar with the matter confirmed to CNBC.

The expected launch of a Select Subcommittee on Federal Government Armaments, reported earlier Monday by Axios, represents one of many nods that Chairman-elect Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., has given to the conservative faction of the GOP in his long battle to winning the gavel. The Wall Street Journal opinion section previously reported plans for the panel.

House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, who supported McCarthy in his bid for chairman, is expected to lead the new subcommittee. The panel will investigate communications between tech companies and the executive branch and look for signs of pressure leading to conservative online censorship.

Jordan hinted at those plans last month in a series of letters to CEOs of the An apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft demanding information about what he called “the nature and extent of your companies’ collusion with the Biden administration.” Jordan told the companies they must preserve any existing or future records related to his request to communicate with the executive about “moderation, deletion, suppression, restriction or reduced distribution of content.”

Facebook parent Meta and Microsoft previously declined to comment on Jordan’s letters. The three other companies did not respond to previous requests for comment.

The decision to create the panel comes after Twitter owner Elon Musk released the “Twitter Files” — reports from a select group of journalists he allowed access to internal files after taking over the company — renewed fervor over the platform’s past decisions to moderate the content under its previous ownership.

The most scrutinized of that election was Twitter’s decision to block links to a New York Post article before the 2020 election that claimed to have found “smoking gun” emails related to the then-Democratic presidential candidate party Joe Biden and his son Hunter. At the time, Twitter said it believed the story violated its hacked content policy. Twitter later reversed the decision, and its then-CEO said the actions taken by the platform were “wrong,” changing its policies to prevent a repeat.

The new subcommittee is also expected to look at other areas of potential influence and politicization in government, including the intelligence community and public health agencies.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But in response to a Politico article last month describing negotiations to create the subcommittee, White House spokesman Ian Sams wrote on Twitter“House Republicans continue to make it clear they are focused on meaningless political gimmicks to engage with Tucker Carlson instead of working with @POTUS or Democrats in Congress to tackle the issues Americans care about, like tackling inflation and cost reduction.”

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