TikTok on Thursday made public a letter accusing the Biden administration of engaging in “political demagoguery” during high-stakes negotiations between the government and the company in an effort to ease concerns about its presence in the US.
The letter — sent to David Newman, a top official in the Justice Department’s national security division, before President Biden signed the potential TikTok ban into law — was filed in federal court, along with a legal brief in support of the lawsuit of the company against measures.
Beijing-based TikTok parent company ByteDance is also a plaintiff in the lawsuit, which is expected to be one of the largest legal battles in technology and internet history.
The internal documents detail negotiations between TikTok and the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a secretive interagency panel that investigates corporate agreements on national security issues, between January 2021 and August 2022.
TikTok has said those conversations ultimately resulted in a draft 90-page security agreement, which would have required the company to implement more robust protections around U.S. user data. It would also have required TikTok to implement a “kill switch” that would have allowed CFIUS to suspend the platform if it was found not to be in compliance with the agreement.
However, lawyers for TikTok said the agency had ceased “all substantive denials” with the company after it submitted the draft agreement in August 2022. CFIUS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The letter to Newman details additional meetings between TikTok and government officials since then, including a March 2023 phone call that the company said was arranged by Paul Rosen, the U.S. Treasury Department’s undersecretary for investment security.
According to TikTok, Rosen told the company that “senior government officials” deemed the draft agreement insufficient to address the government’s national security concerns. Rosen also said that a solution would have to involve a divestiture by ByteDance and the migration of the social platform’s source code, or its fundamental programming, from China.
TikTok’s lawsuit has portrayed divestiture as a technological impossibility because the law requires all of TikTok’s millions of lines of code to be wrested from ByteDance so there would be no “operational relationship” between the Chinese company and the new US app.
After the Wall Street Journal reported in March 2023 that CFIUS had threatened ByteDance to divest TikTok or face a ban, TikTok’s lawyers held another call with senior officials at the Justice and Treasury Departments, where they said leaks to the media by government officials “problematic and harmful.”
That call was followed by an in-person meeting in May 2023 between TikTok’s lawyers, technical experts and senior Treasury Department staff focused on data security measures and TikTok’s source code, the company’s lawyers said. The last meeting with CFIUS took place in September 2023.
In the letter to Newman, TikTok’s attorneys say CFIUS provides a constructive way to address the government’s concerns. However, they added that the agency can only serve this purpose if the law – which mandates confidentiality – and regulations “are complied with and both parties engage in good faith in discussions, as opposed to political subterfuge, obscuring CFIUS negotiations for legislative purposes. .”
The legal brief also shared details of, but does not include, a one-page document that the Justice Department allegedly provided to members of Congress in March, a month before they passed the federal bill that would require the platform to be sold to an approved buyer is sold. or face a ban.
TikTok’s lawyers said the document alleged that TikTok collects sensitive data without alleging that the Chinese government ever obtained such data. According to the company, the document also alleged that TikTok’s algorithm creates the opportunity for China to influence content on the platform without claiming that the country has ever done so.
