A newly formed anti-corruption group has sued President Donald Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi over the deal that sold TikTok’s US operations to a group of administration-backed investors.
The lawsuit, filed by the Public Integrity Project, a law firm that seeks to raise the “reputational cost of corruption in America,” argued that the deal violated laws intended to prevent the spread of Chinese government propaganda and enriched Trump’s allies.
That law, signed by then-President Joe Biden in 2024, said TikTok could not be distributed in the United States unless Chinese company ByteDance found a US-based corporate home on the day before Donald Trump’s return to office. This law was upheld by the Supreme Court.
“The law was clear, but it was never enforced,” says the lawsuit, filed Thursday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Shortly after the withdrawal deadline passed, President Trump issued an executive order granting TikTok an extension to find domestic owners and directing 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 suit are two software engineers from California: one is a shareholder in YouTube’s parent company, Alphabet Inc.; Another is Instagram’s parent company, Meta Platforms, Inc. is a shareholder in Both of them say that they are in financial trouble due to non-enforcement of the law.
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 motivation for this law was to prevent the Chinese government from pushing propaganda on American audiences,” Ballou said. “The deal that the president approved is the absolute worst of all possible worlds, because right now ByteDance continues to have an algorithm that means it can censor content it doesn’t like, but at the same time Oracle controls the data and censors the content it doesn’t like. It’s really a terrible situation for users.
Trump signed an executive order paving the way for the deal in September, and earlier this year the White House and China finalized a deal to give control of TikTok’s US operations to a group of Trump-backed investors.
The deal involved investors “including 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 enriching him personally.”
The lawsuit is the first ever filed by the Public Integrity Project, launched this year. Serving on the project’s advisory committee, former Sen. Rep. Russ Feingold, D-Wisc., said the group is “uniquely focused on suing to stop the exploding corruption in our country.”
