U.S. House Pushes DOJ Defense in TikTok Crackdown

On Thursday, a U.S. House committee released a transcript of a March closed-door meeting on TikTok’s threats to the Justice Department in its defense of a statute that attempts to force its Chinese owner to sell its U.S. assets

Thursday, a U.S. House committee voted to release a transcript of a closed-door hearing in March that focused on the threats posed by TikTok to the Justice Department in its defense of a law that aims to compel its Chinese owner to divest the popular app’s U.S. assets.

The law enacted by President Joe Biden in April, which could prohibit the app used by 170 million Americans if the company fails to divest by Jan. 19, 2025, has been challenged in court by China-based ByteDance, TikTok, and a group of TikTok creators.

Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the Energy and Commerce Committee chair, stated that the Justice Department requested that the committee examine a copy of the transcript from the classified March hearing to aid in their litigation.

She said that legislators participating in the briefing “heard from the intelligence community about the dangers posed by applications, like TikTok, that are controlled by foreign adversaries who are determined to exploit and weaponize Americans’ data.”

According to a committee spokesperson, legislators do not intend to publish the transcript. The Department of Justice declined to respond.

According to Rodgers, China has explicitly stated that it has no intention of relinquishing control over applications such as TikTok since the law was enacted. It is a further indication that China is “using these applications in nefarious ways against the American people,” she stated.

TikTok, which declined to provide a comment, previously stated that “the process for this legislation was intentionally conducted in secret and rushed through because the bill’s authors knew it was the only way they could push it forward.”.

On Sept. 16, a U.S. court will hear oral arguments regarding the legal challenges. The petitions are scheduled for a response from the Justice Department by July 26.

In a document that Reuters initially reported, the Justice Department stated that it would be in a more favorable legal position if lawmakers ordered ByteDance to divest TikTok at the classified hearing in March.

The briefing incorporated a one-page unclassified document that Reuters viewed. The document stated that TikTok posed “key national security concerns” due to its “collection of tremendous amounts of sensitive data” and that Chinese ownership places “TikTok’s American users at risk.”

According to the document: “Working through ByteDance, the PRC (People’s Republic of China) could use TikTok to access data on millions of U.S. users and control the software on millions of U.S. devices.”

The courts prevented President Donald Trump’s previous attempt to prohibit TikTok in late 2020.