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A newly formed anti-corruption group has filed a complaint against President Donald Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi over the deal that sold TikTok’s U.S. operations to a group of administration-backed investors.
The complaint, filed by the Public Integrity Project, a law firm that seeks to increase the “reputational cost of corruption in America,” claims the deal violates a law intended to prevent the spread of Chinese government propaganda and has enriched Trump’s allies.
That law, signed by then-President Joe Biden in 2024, stipulated that TikTok could not be distributed in the United States unless Chinese company ByteDance found a U.S.-based headquarters the day before Donald Trump returned to power. The 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 divestment deadline passed, President Trump issued an executive order purportedly granting TikTok an extension to find a domestic 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 in Meta Platforms, Inc., the parent company of Instagram. Both claim to have suffered financially from the non-enforcement of the law.
Brendan Ballou, CEO of the Public Integrity Project and a former Justice Department prosecutor, told NBC News that the Trump deal was bad for TikTok users and for the country.
“The original motivation for this law was to prevent the Chinese government from spreading propaganda to the American public,” Ballou said. “The deal that the president approved is 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. Really, it’s a situation that’s going to be terrible for users and terrible for free speech on the platform.”
President Donald Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi in the Oval Office in October.File John McDonnell/APAsset signed a decree in September paving the way for the agreement, and the White House and China finalized deal to hand control of TikTok’s U.S. operations to a group of Trump-backed investors earlier this year.
The deal included investors “Oracle, MGX and affiliates of Susquehanna International Group, LLP and General Atlantic, among other companies,” who, according to the lawsuit, “have close ties to the president and at times personally enriched him.”
This lawsuit is the first filed by the Public Integrity Projectlaunched this year. Former Sen. Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, who serves on the project’s advisory committee, said the group “is solely focused on pursuing legal action to end the corruption that is exploding in our country.”