The decision by a federal judge Sunday to temporarily block a federal ban on TikTok marks another setback for\u00a0President Trump\u2019s efforts to quickly overhaul how the Chinese-owned platform does business in the U.S.<\/p>\n
The ruling also creates more confusion around the wildly popular video app\u2019s continued U.S. operations. Beijing-based ByteDance has yet to receive final approval from the federal government on its new business arrangement with Oracle and Walmart, and the pending deal does not appear to require the Chinese company to fully divest itself of TikTok.<\/p>\n
All of the concerns around TikTok also feed into broader efforts by the Trump administration to clamp down on Chinese tech companies across various sectors as tensions between the two countries increase.<\/p>\n
U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee, cited larger concerns around China in a ruling unsealed Monday, writing that while the Trump administration \u201chas provided ample evidence that China presents a significant national security threat,\u201d the \u201cspecific evidence of the threat\u201d posed by TikTok \u201cremains less substantial.\u201d<\/p>\n
Brief reprieve:<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0The order allows TikTok to operate normally in the U.S. at least until a full court hearing can be held. The hearing has not yet been scheduled.<\/p>\n The order by Nichols blocks a Commerce Department deadline that would have removed TikTok from app stores on Sept. 27, though Trump\u2019s executive order from August does not prevent the app\u2019s use on U.S. devices that have already downloaded TikTok. The judge\u2019s order leaves in place a Nov. 12 deadline that would completely ban the use of TikTok in the U.S. if a deal is not reached between the Trump administration and the company.<\/p>\n The Nov. 12 date coincides with efforts by the Treasury Department\u2019s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) to come to a conclusion on TikTok and on Chinese communications app WeChat. Should a deal be reached, the court case will likely be dropped.<\/p>\n The court case is in response to a pair of executive orders issued by Trump in August that are aimed at forcing ByteDance to divest itself of TikTok due to national security concerns.<\/p>\n Brian Fleming, former counsel to the assistant attorney general for national security at the Justice Department during the Obama and Trump administrations, told The Hill that he believed a deal will ultimately be reached allowing the app to continue operating.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is too much at stake for a deal not to be reached, and that goes from all sides of it,\u201d said Fleming, who is a member of law firm Miller and Chevalier Chartered.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The decision by a federal judge...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":28361,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","category-u-s-a"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28360"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28360\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28362,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28360\/revisions\/28362"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/28361"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}