An anti-corruption group has filed a lawsuit against Donald Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi over the deal shifting TikTok’s US operations to investors tied to the administration.
The suit says the arrangement breaches a 2024 divestment law and padded the wallets of Trump allies.
NBC News reports the Public Integrity Project, a law firm aiming to raise the “reputational cost of corruption in America”, is behind the filing. It argues the deal guts a law meant to curb Chinese government propaganda while leaving the platform’s secret sauce in Beijing’s hands.
The law, signed by then president Joe Biden in 2024, said TikTok could not be distributed in the US unless ByteDance found an American-based corporate home by the day before Trump returned to office. The Supreme Court upheld that law, but the enforcement never happened.
Public Integrity Project, chief executive Brendan Ballou said: “The law was clear, but it was never enforced. 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 are two California software engineers who say they were financially harmed when the government shrugged off the deadline. One is a shareholder in Alphabet, YouTube’s parent, and the other is a shareholder in Meta Platforms, Instagram’s parent.
Ballou said: “The original motivation for this law was to prevent the Chinese government from pushing propaganda onto American audiences. 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.”
The suit claims the transfer left ByteDance holding the algorithm while Oracle sits on the data, which is a lovely way to make everyone angry at once. It is the sort of “solution” that looks designed to calm headlines, not fix the problem.
The complaint piles on the proximity claims, noting Oracle co-founder and chairman Larry Ellison “previously hosted a $100,000-per-person fundraiser for Trump at Ellison’s estate”.
It says Ellison and his son David Ellison “purchased CBS News, which the elder Ellison has assured President Trump he would make a more conservative outlet”, and claims David Ellison, with backing from his father, “is now trying to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, an acquisition requiring approval from the Trump administration.”
If the court buys the argument that the divestment deadline was real and the workaround was theatre, the next round will be less about TikTok dances and more about who signed what and who got paid.
