I think you are mistakenly conflating government official request with legal request. Maybe I would have been better off to use "legal demand". A senator can a

I think you are mistakenly conflating government official request with legal request. Maybe I would have been better off to use "legal demand". A senator can ask you to do something but the fact the they are a senator does not legally obligate you to comply. But if the DoJ sends you a demand (I'm not a lawyer, I'm just making up details here) let's say it's signed by a judge or something, what are you gonna do, say no? There are also cases like child pornography where you might preemptively remove stuff without any demand because you want to but it would still be under justification of it clearly complying with a law so you haven't poisoned the well of if you censored anything. And that's really the important factor in the end. As everyone else had said, if you don't do that stuff, you are just going to get your domain and assets seized anyway.