On March 5, 2026, two California software engineers, Zhaocheng Tan, a shareholder in Google parent Alphabet, and Garrett Reid, a shareholder in Meta, sued President Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit over the sale of TikTok's U.S. business. They are represented by the Public Integrity Project, a new firm led by former Justice Department prosecutor Brendan Ballou that says it aims to raise the “reputational cost of corruption in America.”
The 2024 law required ByteDance to divest TikTok's U.S. operations by January 19, 2025, and the Supreme Court upheld it. The law allowed one 90-day extension if there was evidence of significant progress toward a deal, but Trump instead issued repeated extensions and directed the Justice Department not to enforce it. “The law was clear, but it was never enforced,” the suit says. In January 2026, Trump approved a deal giving control of TikTok's U.S. operations to investors including Oracle, MGX, Susquehanna International Group and General Atlantic, with ByteDance keeping 19.9%.
The suit argues the deal “facially violated” the law because ByteDance would continue to own TikTok's recommendation algorithm and license it to the U.S. entity, an “operational relationship” the statute forbids. It also argues that the deal rewarded allies, saying the investors “have close ties to the President, and have at times personally enriched him.” It cites a $100,000-per-person Trump fundraiser at Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison's home, donations to pro-Trump super PACs by leaders of Susquehanna and General Atlantic, and MGX's deal involving $2 billion of a cryptocurrency issued by a Trump family-affiliated company. The plaintiffs say they were financially harmed as investors in TikTok's competitors.
“By flaunting the law so publicly, I think the president is trying to send a message that he is quite literally beyond the reach of the courts, beyond the reach of Congress, beyond the reach of the rule of law,” Ballou told NPR. The Justice Department declined to comment, and Oracle declined to comment to CBS News. The enrichment claims are the plaintiffs' allegations.
Correction (October 2, 2026): This entry said the suit was filed by an anti-corruption group; it was filed by two individual investors represented by that group. It stated as fact that the deal's structure “benefits Trump's financial interests”; that is the suit's allegation and is now attributed. An unsourced claim that the case fits a pattern including “tariffs that exempt Trump-connected businesses” was removed, and the title was revised.