A newly formed anti-corruption group has sued President Donald Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi over the deal that sold TikTok operations in the US to a group of administration-backed investors.
The lawsuit, filed by the Public Integrity Project, a law firm that seeks to raise “the cost of corruption in America,” says the deal violates a law meant to prevent the spread of Chinese government propaganda and enrich Trump allies.
That law, signed by then-President Joe Biden in 2024, said TikTok could not be distributed in the United States unless the Chinese company ByteDance found an American-based business home a day before Donald Trump returned to office. This law was upheld by the Supreme Court.
“The law was clear, but it was not enforced,” said the lawsuit, filed Thursday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. “Immediately after the withdrawal deadline passed, President Trump ordered an extension of time for TikTok to find a home owner and ordered his Attorney General not to enforce the law.”
The Justice Department and TikTok US did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit are two software engineers from California: One is a shareholder in Alphabet Inc., YouTube’s parent company; the other is a shareholder of Meta Platforms, Inc., which is the parent company of Instagram. Both said they suffered financially due to non-compliance.
Brendan Ballou, CEO of the Public Integrity Project and a former Justice Department prosecutor, told NBC News that Trump’s deal is bad for TikTok users and the country.
“The original reason for this law was to prevent the Chinese government from pushing propaganda against the American people,” Ballou said. “The deal approved by the president is not the worst of all possible worlds, because right now ByteDance continues to own the algorithm, which means it can censor content it doesn’t like, but at the same time Oracle controls the data and can censor information it doesn’t like. It’s really a situation that could be difficult for users on the platform and worse.”
Trump signed an executive order in September paving the way for the deal, and the White House and China finalized an agreement to control TikTok’s US operations from a group of Trump-backed investors earlier this year.
The deal included investors “Oracle, MGX, and subsidiaries of Susquehanna International Group, LLP and General Atlantic, among other companies,” the lawsuit said, “having close ties to the President, and at times personally enriching him.”
This claim is the first filed by the Public Integrity Project, which was launched this year. Former Sen. Rep. Russ Feingold, D-Wisc., who serves on the task force’s advisory committee, said the group is “specially focused on impeachment to stop the corruption that plagues our country.”
