Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.) grilled DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and FBI director Christopher Wray on whether their respective agencies are still colluding with social-media companies to censor Americans.

The two officials struggled in answering the senator’s questions during the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on Tuesday, particularly those questions related to the censorship of speech related to the Covid pandemic and vaccine efficacy.

Paul asked Mayorkas if DHS continues to discuss “content moderation” with major social-media platforms. “We do not meet with social media companies for the purpose of instructing them to take down content,” Mayorkas responded, before Paul asked whether such meetings were previously held.

“What we have done in the past, Ranking Member Paul, as I shared with you previously, is we, along with other federal agencies, have met with social media companies in a public-private partnership to speak of the threats to the homeland so that those companies are alert to them,” Mayorkas said. “We do not instruct them.”

Paul also pressed Mayorkas about whether he perceived skepticism around vaccine efficacy as a threat to the homeland. Mayorkas said he didn’t think conversations surrounding that topic posed a threat to the U.S., adding that DHS is no longer participating in meetings with social-media companies.

The hearing exchange comes after Missouri and Louisiana filed a joint lawsuit earlier this year, accusing the Biden administration of colluding with platforms like Twitter and Facebook to suppress users’ speech.

This month, the Supreme Court temporarily froze a lower-court ruling from July that barred federal agencies and officials from communicating directly with social-media companies until a final decision is made. The high court is currently hearing the case.

As for Wray’s exchange with Paul, the FBI director said his agency is “having some interaction with social-media companies, but all of those interactions have changed fundamentally in the wake of the court order.” Additionally, Wray said there was no acknowledgement that those discussions involved “constitutionally protected speech,” as Paul put it.

Vaccine efficacy was also not a topic of concern to the FBI, Wray added. “We would not have been engaging with social media companies about vaccine efficacy to my knowledge.”

While Wray insisted the bureau never instructed social-media firms to censor speech, the two southern states allege in their lawsuit that several Biden administration agencies, including the DHS and the FBI, suppressed online speech about the Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 presidential election, the lab-leak theory that led to a global pandemic, the efficacy of masks and lockdowns, and election integrity in 2020, among other claims.

The suit’s plaintiffs also allege YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and others took down social-media posts that were critical of these topics at the behest of the federal government. Suspending users on these platforms and “shadow banning” certain posts, which means someone’s post doesn’t appear in their followers’ feeds, were other examples of actions that arose out of this collusive relationship.