Speaker Mike Johnson on Sunday dispelled the notion that President-elect Donald Trump would bring TikTok back early in his second term without the company’s willingness to sell to a U.S.-based owner.
“I think we will enforce the law,” Johnson told NBC News’ “Meet the Press” on Sunday, a day after Trump told NBC News that he would “most likely” give TikTok a 90-day extension to operate in the U.S.
Johnson’s remarks come just hours after TikTok halted operations in the U.S., cutting user access to the app. At the same time, Apple, Google and Microsoft removed the app from app stores, preventing new users from downloading it.
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., at a Senate hearing last week.
A bipartisan bill passed last year and signed by President Joe Biden went into effect Sunday, effectively banning TikTok from the U.S. if the app, which is owned by the Chinese-based company ByteDance, isn’t sold to a U.S.-based owner.
In the last few months, TikTok made a last-ditch effort with the Supreme Court to save themselves from the ban, but the court upheld the law on Friday.
Trump, who supported banning TikTok during his first term, has now emerged in favor of keeping the app running in the U.S. Before the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case, Trump’s team filed a brief asking the court to hit pause on the law, saying it would give his new administration time to find a solution.
The ban went into effect the day before Trump’s inauguration to a second term.
On Saturday, the president-elect told NBC News he would “most likely” give TikTok a 90-day extension to avoid a ban once he takes office, something that the senators specifically disagreed with in their statement.
“I think that would be, certainly, an option that we look at,” Trump said in a phone interview. “The 90-day extension is something that will be most likely done, because it’s appropriate. You know, it’s appropriate. We have to look at it carefully. It’s a very big situation.”
Johnson noted that he believed that in the last few months, Trump has been referring to a plan to bring the app back via a sale, not as it operates now.
“When President Trump issued the Truth [Social] post and said, ‘Save Tiktok,’ the way we read that is that he’s going to try to force along a true divestiture, changing of hands, the ownership,” Johnson said Sunday.
“It’s not the platform that members of Congress are concerned about. It’s the Chinese Communist Party and their manipulation of the algorithms — they have been flooding the minds of American children with terrible messages glorifying violence and anti-semitism and even suicide and eating disorders. I mean, crazy kinds of stuff, and they’re mining the data of American citizens. It’s a very dangerous thing,” he added.
But later Sunday morning, Trump seemingly pushed back on Johnson’s assertion, writing on TruthSocial that he would like the app to come back online in the U.S. as soon as possible, even in the absence of a deal, to buy him some time to make one.
“I’m asking companies not to let TikTok stay dark! I will issue an executive order on Monday to extend the period of time before the law’s prohibitions take effect, so that we can make a deal to protect our national security,” the president-elect wrote.
“The order will also confirm that there will be no liability for any company that helped keep TikTok from going dark before my order,” Trump added.
Shortly before Johnson’s comments, Sens. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and Pete Ricketts, R-Neb., broke with Trump, too, celebrating the app’s ban that went into effect Sunday.
“We commend Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft for following the law and halting operations with ByteDance and TikTok, and we encourage other companies to do the same. The law, after all, risks ruinous bankruptcy for any company who violates it,” Cotton and Ricketts wrote in a statement.
Sen. Pete Ricketts on Capitol Hill on May 21, 2024.
“Now that the law has taken effect, there’s no legal basis for any kind of ‘extension’ of its effective date. For TikTok to come back online in the future, ByteDance must agree to a sale that satisfies the law’s qualified-divestiture requirements by severing all ties between TikTok and Communist China,” they added.
In the wake of the news later in the day that TikTok was working to get back up and running in the U.S., Cotton, the new chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, responded to TikTok statement alluding to other ways the company could be punished, even if they avoided penalties from the federal government.
“Any company that hosts, distributes, services, or otherwise facilitates communist-controlled TikTok could face hundreds of billions of dollars of ruinous liability under the law, not just from DOJ, but also under securities law, shareholder lawsuits, and state AGs. Think about it,” he wrote on X.
Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee also blasted TikTok, writing on X, “TikTok’s trying to play the victim, but it has nobody to blame but itself. ByteDance has had 270 days to sell TikTok, but they’ve been fighting it since day one because they refuse to give up Communist China’s chokehold on Americans’ data.”
The law on the books doesn’t grant the president the authority to make a 90-day extension without guarantees that ByteDance is actually seeking to sell the app to a U.S.-based company.
“The President may grant a one-time extension of not more than 90 days … if the President certifies to Congress that— (A) a path to executing a qualified divestiture has been identified with respect to such application,” the law says, adding that there must be “evidence of significant progress” towards a sale, which include “the relevant binding legal agreements to enable” a sale.
On Sunday, Johnson said that he doesn’t have “any confidence in ByteDance.”
“The law is very precise, and the only way to extend that is if there is an actual deal in the works,” Johnson added. “I think President Trump is probably intrigued by all this and he likes to make deals, as you know. So we’re very hopeful that that can happen, and that 270 million American people who enjoy the platform can enjoy it, but enjoy it safely and not have their data being mined by our nation’s enemy.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
