Democratic members of Congress made outlandish comments and asked bizarre questions during Tuesday’s contentious hearing with Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, amid ongoing concerns about allegations of bias and privacy concerns.

When the Senate Committee on the Judiciary Committee tried to get Pichai to testify earlier this year alongside other online and social media executives, he declined, thus spurring the committee to display an empty chair in his stead at the hearing.

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But Pichai (pictured above center) finally appeared before Congress for the first time on Tuesday to face the House Committee on the Judiciary.

“Users look to us to provide accurate, trusted information, and we work hard to ensure the integrity of our products,” Pichai said. “We have put a number of checks and balances in place to ensure they continue to live up to our standards.”

“I lead this company without political bias and work to ensure that our products continue to operate that way,” he added. “To do otherwise would be against our core principles and our business interests.”

Conservative complaints over censorship allegations against Google, Facebook, Twitter and other companies have exploded in recent months, and President Donald Trump also said he wants to hold social media companies accountable for bias.

“My administration is also standing up for the free speech rights of all Americans, social media giants,” Trump said at a Make America Great Again rally in Evansville, Indiana, in August. “And I’ve made it clear that we, as a country, cannot tolerate political censorship, blacklisting, and rigged search results.”

“We will not let large corporations silence conservative voices,” Trump added. “We are not going to let them control what we can and cannot see, read, and learn from.”

The president specifically targeted Google on Twitter on August 28, writing, “Google search results for ‘Trump News’ shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake News Media. In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD. Fake CNN is prominent. Republican/Conservative & Fair Media is shut out. Illegal? 96% of … results on ‘Trump News’ are from National Left-Wing Media, very dangerous.”

“Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good. They are controlling what we can & cannot see. This is a very serious situation — will be addressed!” Trump added.

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Some Google employees debated whether or not they should try to bury conservative media outlets like The Daily Caller and Breitbart, in particular, from the search function, The Daily Caller reported in late November. But Google executives have denied that such bias exists.

Although Pichai faced intense grilling on bias allegations from conservatives on the House Judiciary Committee, Democratic members either dismissed the hearing as unnecessary — or brought up a bizarre group of other questions.

Here are four of the most notable Democratic questions directed at Pichai:

1.) Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), who will be House Judiciary Committee chair in January, derided Republicans for wanting to hold the hearing at all. “I must first dispense with a completely illegitimate issue, which is the fantasy, dreamed up by some conservatives, that Google and other online platforms have an anti-conservative bias,” Nadler (above left) said. “As I have said repeatedly, no credible evidence supports this right-wing conspiracy theory.”

“I have little doubt that my Republican colleagues will spend much of their time presenting a laundry list of anecdotes and out-of-context statements made by Google employees as supposed evidence of anti-conservative bias. But none of that will actually make it true,” Nadler added. “And even if Google were deliberately discriminating against conservative viewpoints … that would be its right, as a private company, to do so.”

2.) Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) asked Pichai why she finds pictures of Trump when she googles “idiot.”

“Right now, if you google the word ‘idiot’ under images, a picture of Donald Trump comes up. I just did that,” Lofgren (pictured above right) said. “How would that happen? How does search work so that would occur?”

After Pichai explained that Google search engines take “the keyword and match it against the pages and rank them based on over 200 signals” ranging from “relevance, freshness, popularity, how other people are using it,” Lofgren appeared to mock conservatives for their concerns of bias.

“So it’s not some little man sitting behind the curtain figuring out what we’re going to show the user? It’s basically a compilation of what users are generating?” Lofgren said.

3.) Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) complained to Pichai that when he googled himself, he didn’t see enough results about interviews he gave on MSNBC.

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“This weekend I was on MSNBC four times … Yet the first thing that comes up is The Daily Caller, not exactly a liberal, but I guess a well-known, group. Then it’s Roll Call, then Breitbart News, then the Memphis Business Journal, then Breitbart,” Cohen said.

“So it looks like you are overly using conservative news organizations on your news. I’d like you to look into overuse of conservative news organizations to put on liberal people’s news on Google, and if you’d let me know about that I’d appreciate it,” Cohen added.

4.) Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) lectured Pichai, who is Indian-American, about Google’s insufficient amount of diversity.

“My community is diverse. As you well may have heard, the Congressional Black Caucus has been working extensively with Google and other search engines to recognize there are not enough individuals of diversity, African-Americans,” Jackson Lee complained.

“I would be interested in what efforts are being taken by Google’s platform YouTube to promote diversity, inclusion with employees. What are the demographics of YouTube’s U.S. employees, and also how is YouTube currently distributing resources for U.S. diversity?” Jackson Lee asked. “But the focus is on diversity. What are you doing?”

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