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A new organization launched to fight public corruption is suing President Trump and his attorney general, accusing them of flouting the law when they blessed the sale of TikTok’s U.S. assets to White House allies.
The case, filed in a federal court in Washington, D.C., accuses the Trump administration of ignoring legislation designed to stop the spread of Chinese propaganda — and instead helping to broker a partial sale to businessmen close to Trump.
“By flaunting the law so publicly, I think the president is trying to send a message that he is quite literally beyond the reach of the courts, beyond the reach of Congress, beyond the reach of the rule of law,” said Brendan Ballou, chief executive at The Public Integrity Project, the new nonpartisan firm. “And we want to make sure that he isn’t.”
The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. The Department of Justice declined to comment.
Two years ago, Congress passed a law to push TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to hand over control of the app’s U.S. business to investors outside of China. A bipartisan majority of lawmakers worried about the Chinese government using TikTok for mass data collection, or pushing disinformation and propaganda. While there has never been public evidence of this happening, national security experts say it is a reasonable fear.
The law allowed for one extension before it required a divestiture by ByteDance. Instead, Trump granted five separate extensions.
ByteDance argued that the law violated the free speech rights of the company and its millions of users. Last year, after an emergency hearing, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld the law.
Soon after, Trump directed his attorney general, Pam Bondi, not to follow the law, which also required the Justice Department to conduct investigations. DOJ took no public action to investigate. The new lawsuit cites that move as an “ongoing” legal violation.
This past January, Trump approved a deal to sell TikTok’s U.S. assets to a group of companies and businessmen, some of whom had helped raise money for his campaign or invested in his family businesses. That investment group includes Oracle, Abu Dhabi’s MGX, Susquehanna International Group, and General Atlantic.
“I am so happy to have helped in saving TikTok!” Trump wrote on social media, praising the “very dramatic, final, and beautiful conclusion” to the deal.
The new lawsuit points to the fact that ByteDance, the Chinese company, continues to own TikTok’s critical recommendation algorithm and that ByteDance would continue to manage other important operations inside the U.S. — what it calls another violation of the 2024 law.
The plaintiffs in the new case are Zhaocheng Anthony Tan, a software engineer who owns stock in Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google, and Garrett Reid, a software engineer who owns stock in Meta Platforms Inc. Both companies are rivals of TikTok and were expected to benefit after the law passed in 2024. Instead, the investors say they were harmed because of the Trump administration’s failure to enforce it.
Over the past year, the Justice Department has been in turmoil, with new leaders essentially gutting the public integrity and tax units and disbanding a task force designed to fight international corruption. Ballou, a former Justice Department lawyer, said his new firm wants to fill that gap.
“Right now, the basic infrastructure for prosecuting white collar crime is being dismantled at the Department of Justice,” Ballou said. “And so in a world where DOJ is no longer particularly interested in going after rich criminals, we want to recreate some of the infrastructure for that outside of government.”
—NPR’s Bobby Allyn contributed to this report.
