TikTok released a letter on Thursday accusing the Biden administration of engaging in “political demagoguery” amid high-stakes negotiations between the government and the company seeking to ease concerns about its presence in the United States.
The letter, sent to David Neuman, a senior Justice Department national security official, before President Biden signed the TikTok ban bill, was filed in federal court along with a brief supporting the company’s lawsuit against the bill. TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company ByteDance is also a plaintiff in the case, which is expected to be one of the biggest legal battles in technology and internet history.
The internal documents detail negotiations that took place between January 2021 and August 2022 between TikTok and the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a secretive interagency government committee that investigates corporate transactions over national security concerns.
TikTok said those talks ultimately resulted in a 90-page proposed security agreement that required the company to implement stronger protections for U.S. user data, as well as install a “kill switch” that would allow CFIUS to halt the platform if it was found to be in violation of the agreement.
But TikTok’s lawyers said the company “ceased substantive negotiations” with the company after submitting the proposed settlement in August 2022.
CFIUS did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Justice Department said it looks forward to defending the recently enacted bill, which it said “addresses significant national security concerns consistent with the First Amendment and other constitutional limitations.”
“The Department of Justice, along with intelligence agencies and members of Congress, has consistently warned about the threat of authoritarian states weaponizing technology, such as apps and software that run on phones, against us,” the statement said. “This threat is compounded when these authoritarian states demand that companies under their control secretly turn over sensitive data to their governments.”
The letter sent to Neuman details additional meetings between TikTok and government officials since then, including a March 2023 call that the company said was arranged by Paul Rosen, then undersecretary for investment security at the U.S. Treasury Department.
TikTok said Rosen told the company that “senior government officials” deemed the proposed deal insufficient to address the government’s national security concerns. Rosen also said a solution would require ByteDance to divest and move the social platform’s source code, or underlying programming, out of China.
TikTok’s lawsuit argues that divestment is technically impossible because the law requires it to strip ByteDance of all of TikTok’s millions of lines of code so that there is no “business relationship” between the Chinese company and the new U.S. app.
After The Wall Street Journal reported in March 2023 that CFIUS had threatened ByteDance with a ban if it did not sell TikTok, TikTok’s lawyers held another conference call with senior Justice and Treasury staff, saying government officials’ leaks to the media were “troubling and damaging.”
The call was followed in May 2023 by a face-to-face meeting between TikTok’s lawyers, technical experts and senior Treasury officials that focused on data security measures and TikTok’s source code, according to the company’s lawyers. The final meeting with CFIUS took place in September 2023.
In their letter to Neuman, TikTok’s lawyers said CFIUS offers a constructive way to address the government’s concerns, but the agency can only accomplish this goal if confidentiality laws and regulations are adhered to and “CFIUS negotiations are conducted in good faith, rather than as a political ploy to be used for legislative purposes,” they added.
The brief also details, but does not include, a one-page document that the Justice Department reportedly provided to lawmakers in March, a month before federal legislation was passed that would have banned the platforms if they weren’t sold to approved buyers.
TikTok’s lawyers said the document alleges that TikTok collects sensitive data, but maintains that no such data has ever been obtained by the Chinese government. The company said the document also alleges that TikTok’s algorithms create the potential for China to influence content on the platform, but maintains that China has never done so.
