President Donald Trump granted short-form video platform TikTok yet another 90-day extension on the law requiring its Chinese parent company to find a buyer for the platform or be subject to a ban in the United States — and newly-uncovered documents reveal the flimsy legal reasoning his administration is using to circumvent the law, The New York Times reported on Thursday.
Specifically, Attorney General Pam Bondi privately argued to tech platforms in letters obtained this week under the Freedom of Information Act that Trump had "national security" authority to set aside a broad range of laws as he wished.
"In a series of letters to companies like Apple and Google, Ms. Bondi wrote that Mr. Trump had decided that shutting down TikTok would interfere with his 'constitutional duties to take care of the national security and foreign affairs of the United States,'" reported Charlie Savage. "As a result, she continued, she had concluded that the law banning the social media app 'is properly read not to infringe upon such core presidential national security and foreign affairs powers.'"
Legal experts were gobsmacked at this sweeping claim of executive power to simply ignore laws.
“There are other things that are more important than TikTok in today’s world, but for pure refusal to enforce the law as Article II requires, it’s just breathtaking,” said University of Minnesota law professor Alan Rozenshtein. Harvard Law professor Jack Goldstein agreed, saying, “Recent past presidents have been aggressive in exercising law enforcement discretion, but they haven’t suspended the operation of a law entirely or immunized its violation prospectively.”
For example, the report noted, former President Barack Obama created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program to protect immigrants brought illegally to the U.S. as children, but "did not go so far as to say that 'deferred action' made their presence lawful, nor cease to enforce immigration law against others."
In Trump's first term, he proclaimed TikTok to be a threat and tried to unilaterally ban it via executive action, which was struck down by federal courts. Some analysts suspect Trump's 180-degree reversal on the subject came about because of a meeting with billionaire GOP megadonor Jeff Yass, who owns a large stake in the platform.
