Rep. Harriet Hageman, R-Wyo., told Newsmax that the message she took away from Thursday's House Weaponization Subcommittee hearing was that the Democrats "don't like the First Amendment."
"What they like is censorship, and they like to control what people can say and what people can hear," Hageman said during an appearance Thursday on Newsmax's "Spicer & Co."
"We had two gentlemen who appeared before us who are admitted Democrats, both of them said that they voted for Joe Biden, and from the very first moment that the Democrats started questioning them or doing an opening statement or anything else, they just lambasted these two gentlemen.
"But again, what I will say is that the Democrats are terribly concerned about the fact that we have a First Amendment right in this country, and I think they'd like to see that changed," she added.
Hageman said that the House panel probing the weaponization of government examined the First Amendment in the first two hearings and the "federal government's effort to suppress the First Amendment rights of citizens of this country by proxy."
"They were using Twitter and Facebook and other media organizations to not only stop people from being able to speak, but to stop all of us from hearing from people as well," she said.
"Now, we're looking at the Twitter Files, and I can't even describe for you how much fodder we have, how much information we have. The way that I would describe it is that the FBI was using the terms of service from Twitter to suppress the First Amendment.
"What is bizarre is they would send hundreds of names to Twitter and say, 'We think that these people are violating your terms of service,'" Hageman continued. "Well, why in the world would the FBI be involved with whether an individual was violating the terms of service of a private contract?
"Which is broader, the First Amendment or the terms of service? Well clearly, the First Amendment is broader."
For all the talk of "misinformation" and "disinformation," Hageman said, the FBI never raised "anything that was illegal."
"They weren't saying that these tweets were illegal," she said. "They weren't claiming that the people who were doing the tweets were engaged in any kind of illegal conduct whatsoever. They weren't looking at illegality — they were looking at whether they agreed with or disagreed with the tweets that were being tweeted."