“The law was clear, but it was never enforced,” the lawsuit alleges. “Shortly after the deadline to divest passed, President Trump issued an executive order purportedly granting an extension for TikTok to find a domestic owner and directed his Attorney General not to enforce the law.”
An anti-corruption organization has filed a lawsuit against President Donald Trump and U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, claiming that the administration leveraged the law to ensure that TikTok was sold to a group of preferred investors.
According to NBC News, the lawsuit was filed by attorneys from the Public Integrity Project, a recently-formed nonprofit. In court filings, the Public Integrity Project said that the Trump administration violated provisions of the same law that forced TikTok’s sale. One of the key concerns that motivated the law’s passage was that TikTok, previously owned by a China-based company, could be compelled to share consumer data with the Chinese Communist Party.
The statute, notes NBC News, was signed into law by then-President Joe Biden in 2024. It would have prevented the “distribution” of TikTok in the United States unless the platform’s parent company, ByteDance, moved its corporate operations onto American soil.
“The law was clear, but it was never enforced,” the lawsuit alleges. “Shortly after the deadline to divest passed, President Trump issued an executive order purportedly granting an extension for TikTok to find a domestic owner and directed his Attorney General not to enforce the law.”
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit include a shareholder in Alphabet, Inc., which owns YouTube, and a shareholder in Meta Platforms, Inc., the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
Both investors say they were financially harmed by the Trump administration’s failure to enforce the law.
Brendan Ballou, the CEO of the Public Integrity Project and a former prosecutor for the U.S. Department of Justice, told NBC News that that Trump’s deal is bad for TikTok users and for the United States as a whole.
“The original motivation for this law was to prevent the Chinese government from pushing propaganda onto American audiences,” Ballou told NBC News. “The deal that the president approved is the absolute worst of all possible worlds, because right now ByteDance continues to own the algorithm, which means that it can censor the content that it doesn’t like, but at the same time Oracle controls the data and it can censor the information that it doesn’t like. Really it’s a situation that’s going to be terrible for users, and terrible for free speech on the platform.”
In September, Trump signed an executive order paving the way for TikTok’s sale to a group of U.S.-based investors, including investors associated with “Oracle, MGX, and affiliates of Susquehanna International Group, LLP and General Atlantic, among other companies.”
The lawsuit claims that almost all of these companies have “close ties to the President, and have at times personally enriched him.”
Trump has been repeatedly criticized for allegedly using his office to promote his own interests. Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, for instance, “previously hosted a $100,000-per-person fundraiser for Trump at Ellison’s estate.” Shortly afterward, Ellison and his son, David Ellison, “purchased CBS News, which the elder Ellison has assured President Trump he would make a more conservative outlet.” Now, David Ellison is also trying to “buy Warner Bros. Discovery, an acquisition requiring approval from the Trump administration.”
Sources
Tech investors sue Trump administration, accusing it of violating TikTok ban
Trump’s TikTok deal benefited firms that ‘personally enriched’ him, lawsuit says
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