President Donald Trump and US Attorney General Pam Bondi are being accused of violating the 2024 law that imposed a TikTok ban unless its parent company divested its US operations to new owners outside China.
A petition, shared with Bloomberg Law before docketing by Brendan Ballou of the Public Integrity Project, asks the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit to declare the sale of TikTok’s US operations is unlawful. The petition was filed with the appeals court Thursday, Ballou said.
The US Department of Justice declined to comment. The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The 2024 law required TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance Ltd., to divest its US operations by Jan. 19, 2025. It was passed as US lawmakers worried TikTok could be used to collect data on and surveil American citizens, given China requires its companies to share data with the government upon request. TikTok denies the allegations and attempted to address concerns by transferring US data to Oracle servers in 2022 as part of its “Project Texas,” which was ultimately rejected by the US government. The app, which TikTok says has more than 170 million US users, faced a nationwide ban if it didn’t meet the deadline.
Trump granted five extensions of the law’s deadline until a handful of investment firms and US-based software firm Oracle—which allegedly have “contributed millions to the President’s political projects or invested billions in his personal businesses,” the petition says—announced Jan. 22 they were acquiring TikTok’s US operations. The petitioners assert the extensions violated the law.
The deal itself is also illegal because ByteDance will continue to own the app’s recommendation algorithm and run TikTok’s e-commerce and advertising operations, terms which “subvert the very purpose of the TikTok Law,” the filing says.
The petitioners, software engineers Zhaocheng Anthony Tan and Garrett Reid, are respectively investors in Alphabet Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc., which are direct competitors to TikTok. They assert the administration’s violations of the 2024 law have caused them financial harm.
Public Integrity Project represents the petitioners.
The case is Tan v. Trump, D.C. Cir., No. 26-01047, petition filed 3/5/26.
(Updates third and fourth paragraphs with response from DOJ and additional context.)
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