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Nearly three weeks after the Federal Communications Commission voted to regulate broadband Internet like a public utility, Congress is putting the agency and its new rules under the microscope.

On Tuesday, in the first of five Congressional hearings on the agency in the next two weeks, Republican members of the House Committee on Oversight & Government Reform raised questions about whether the White House improperly influenced the F.C.C., an independent agency. In a public video last fall, President Obama urged the agency to pass strong regulation. On Thursday, the F.C.C. released the full text of its new rules, which fall under Title II of the Communications Act and are intended to protect the open Internet by prohibiting service providers from speeding up or slowing down users’ access to certain kinds of content.

Facing a tough tone from Republican lawmakers about his handling of the rules, Tom Wheeler, chairman of the F.C.C., pushed back repeatedly, arguing that the president had no undue influence on his rule-making.

Mr. Wheeler, a former top fund-raiser for Mr. Obama, said that the president had not seen the text of the controversial order prior to the agency’s vote on it last month. He added that he had been in the Oval Office only once since he became chairman, days after he was appointed in November 2013.

“In that meeting, he said, ‘I will never call you. You are an independent agency,’ ” Mr. Wheeler said of Mr. Obama. “And he has been good to his word.”

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Republicans focused on 10 meetings Mr. Wheeler had with various members of the White House over the last year, asking about the substance of each conversation. Mr. Wheeler said that many of those meetings had focused on unrelated issues, including trade, hacking and the agency’s auction of new airwaves for wireless broadband.

And Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a Republican from Utah and chairman of the committee, announced that the Inspector General of the F.C.C. was undertaking an investigation into how the agency arrived at its rules, an inquiry that Mr. Wheeler said he did not know about.

Questions from elected representatives had a tone of interrogation that Peter Welch, Democratic representative from Vermont, called reminiscent of the Watergate hearings for their fixation on “what did you know and when did you know it,” regarding Mr. Wheeler’s digestion of President Obama’s input.

Rep. John Mica, a Republican from Florida, said he thought it was clear that Mr. Wheeler had been “strong armed” into a position vastly different than the one he had originally held.

Democratic lawmakers, meanwhile, argued that the actions of the White House were consistent with actions of previous administrations. Some Democrats pointed out that presidents including Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton had expressed their opinions to the F.C.C., too.

“The president was not and should not have been silenced,” said Eleanor Holmes Norton, a Democrat from the District of Columbia.

Mr. Wheeler emphasized both his agency’s independence and its natural consideration of a variety of perspectives — those voiced by members of Congress, by the millions of members of the public who submitted comments on the issue, and by the president. He added that the F.C.C.’s rules were not entirely reflective of Mr. Obama’s specific vision.

Mr. Chaffetz, the Republican committee chairman, criticized not the rules themselves but the agency’s process of passing and releasing them. He took particular issue with the two weeks between when the agency voted on the new rules and published them.

The rules were subject to a period of so-called editorial privilege, typical of the F.C.C.’s rule-making process, that allows the agency to make non-substantive final edits after a vote, in order to address dissenting arguments and legal questions to better protect against court challenges. The delayed release of the new rules was not unusual; past chairmen of the agency have, on occasion, taken several months to release the full text of an order.

Four similar hearings with lawmakers are scheduled within the next two weeks, including ones called by the Senate Commerce Committee and the House Judiciary Committee. The tone of each is expected to be similarly sharp and divided along party lines.

But as Mr. Wheeler anticipates further scrutiny, he said he remained confident in and proud of the agency’s choices. “There is no way I am apologetic,” he said. “I am fiercely proud of this decision.”