On Wednesday, Twitter C.E.O. Jack Dorsey, wearing a light blue shirt with an upturned collar under a dark blazer, provided patient responses to repetitive lines of questioning from Republican lawmakers who, over and over, asked whether Twitter favored liberal politicians and causes. From the outside, the hearing appeared to be just another navel-gazing political circus, with lawmakers half-heartedly attempting to turn Dorsey into an avatar for Silicon Valley’s alleged bias against conservatives. Media attention to the event was similarly apathetic, with the crush of reporters present when Dorsey arrived slowly peeling away as the session stretched to two hours.

The Trump administration, however, is eager to elevate bias in Big Tech into a potent cultural-war issue ahead of the midterms. And Donald Trump’s long-suffering attorney general, Jeff Sessions, appears to be taking the charge seriously. On Wednesday, just before Dorsey was sworn in for a ritualistic grilling, the Justice Department released a statement announcing that Sessions had planned a meeting with several state attorneys general for September 25 “to discuss a growing concern that these companies may be hurting competition and intentionally stifling the free exchange of ideas on their platforms.”

Legal experts I spoke to derided the Justice Department initiative as unusual, confusing, and probably futile. There is, after all, no legal requirement that Facebook, Twitter, or Google maintain a “free exchange of ideas.” The First Amendment “doesn’t apply to private actors,” as Lata Nott, the executive director of the Freedom Forum Institute at the First Amendment Center, told me. “I can’t see too many scenarios that would realistically happen where the government could dictate a tech company’s policies.” It’s possible, she hedged, but it would necessitate “a huge overhaul of the way these things are regulated.”

For now, at least, the Justice Department doesn’t have a case. “The allegations about politically motivated limits are just politically motivated attacks—the social-media equivalent of the relentless attacks on the media,” said Mark Lemley, the director of the Stanford Program in Law, Science, and Technology. “There is no evidence that there is any political motivation to whose speech is being blocked or targeted. And even if there was, that simply isn’t an anti-trust issue.” Anti-trust specialist David Garcia, a partner at Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton, was similarly stumped. “It’s very hard to understand how this goes anywhere,” he told me. “I’m not sure how you’d do this. I can’t figure out the analytical context would be that would support this kind of an investigation.”

More likely, Nott suggested, Sessions is acting in bad faith, using the free-speech issue as a Trojan horse to get conservatives on board with supporting a decidedly un-conservative push to regulate or break up major tech companies. “I can’t speculate about what the intention is behind this, but it doesn’t seem like a realistic legal tactic to accomplish what they say is their goal, which is apparently changing the content policies of these platforms,” Nott told me, characterizing the announcement as confusing. “If the government won an anti-trust suit against Facebook or Google, I guess they could break up Facebook so that Instagram and WhatsApp run as separate companies. But I don’t really see why that would change their free-speech policies. I don’t see why that would reach the outcome they’re apparently trying to reach. It makes it seem like the government is threatening an action and tying it into speech concerns.”

If anti-trust action is the Trump administration’s real intent, it would find no shortage of potential liberal allies, who might support litigation to regulate or even break up companies like Google or Facebook. (The F.T.C. could reopen its probe into Google, for instance.) European Union regulators have already set a strict precedent for U.S. tech companies abroad: this summer, the E.U. slapped Google with record-breaking anti-trust fines and has imposed strict data-privacy rules, forcing companies to comply or cease operations. If U.S. lawmakers or regulators want to follow the same path, Europe has already provided the blueprint.