TikTok asks U.S. court to slow forced sale with deadline approaching
After months of threatening to ban TikTok on national security grounds, President Trump issued an order in Augustrequiring ByteDance to sell its U.S. operations by Nov 12. In September, the Trump administration announced it would essentially ban TikTok by that same date unless the company sold its U.S. assets.
TikTok has been scrambling to negotiate with investors and suitors to resolve the fight, and it struck a preliminary deal to spin off its U.S. operations with investment from Oracle and Walmart. The deal would create a new TikTok Global company headquartered in the United States, with Walmart and Oracle as investors, according to the companies. It would also make Oracle a technology partner that secures TikTok’s U.S. data.
Trump gave his conditional blessing to that proposal in September, but a TikTok spokeswoman said Tuesday that the company hasn’t been able to finalize the deal because of the government’s process. The company said it asked the government for a 30-day extension, which was a condition of the order, but it hadn’t been granted by Tuesday.
TikTok has vigorously resisted the Trump orders in court and in public statements, insisting it is not a security risk and that it keeps data private. The U.S. government said TikTok is a national security threat because the data it collects on U.S. customers could be turned over to the Chinese government.
But the Trump administration has been dealt a series of blows on the matter, including late last month, when a federal judge issued an injunction halting the app’s ban from going into effect.
Lawyers said that injunction could make it hard for the government to enforce its order to sell the U.S. operations by mid-November.
Trump issued his divestiture order after a review by the interagency Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which is chaired by the Treasury Department. TikTok said in its Tuesday court petition that its due process rights were violated when CFIUS “truncated” its review and referred the matter to Trump for his sign-off.
The Treasury Department and Walmart did not have comment. Oracle didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
