Trump not ready to OK TikTok deal, admits US won't get cut
India TodayPresident Donald Trump said he expects to get a report Thursday about Oracle’s bid for the Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok and admitted there is no legal path to letting the US Treasury get a cut of the deal — a proposition experts had criticized as unprecedented and possibly illegal. In an August 6 order, Trump said TikTok “reportedly censors content that the Chinese Communist Party deems politically sensitive,” is potentially a source for disinformation campaigns and “threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information.” TikTok maintains that it has not shared U.S. user data with the Chinese government and would not do so, says it does not censor videos at the request of Chinese authorities and notes that moderators for U.S. operations are led by a US team. “An ongoing ‘partnership’ that allows for anything other than the full emancipation of the TikTok software from potential Chinese Communist Party control is completely unacceptable, and flatly inconsistent with the President’s Executive Order of August 6,” he wrote on Tuesday. A group of six other Republican senators led by Marco Rubio of Florida on Wednesday sent a letter to the president expressing reservations about the partnership agreement with Oracle, saying that it appears to have “significant unresolved national security issues” and that a deal “must ensure that TikTok’s U.S. operations, data and algorithms are entirely outside the control of ByteDance or any Chinese-state directed actors.” A Trump executive order has set a September 20 deadline, although it isn’t clear what will happen on that day.