President Trump has given TikTok yet another lifeline. The president on Friday granted the video app a 75-day extension, allowing the China-based company additional time to break away from Beijing.
The White House's TikTok deal "requires more work to ensure all necessary approvals are signed," Trump wrote on Truth Social.
He said the administration hopes to "continue working in Good Faith with China, who I understand are not very happy about our Reciprocal Tariffs," referring to the 34 percent levy on Chinese imports Trump announced this week.
Negotiators had been expecting to announce a TikTok deal on Friday morning, but Chinese regulators threw a wrench into the process by telling ByteDance it would not be approving the agreement in response to Trump's stiff tariffs on Chinese imports, according to a source directly involved in the talks who was not authorized to speak publicly.
Officials in Beijing are attempting to "hold the deal hostage" until China can extract some kind of concessions, perhaps in the form of tariff relief, the person said.
A second factor that complicated the plans was Trump's firing of a National Security Council official who was helping to coordinate the TikTok deal. A person involved in the talks said it was unclear if the president was aware the fired official was helping to broker the TikTok deal.
ByteDance said in a statement that negotiations over TikTok's future in the U.S. will continue, but that there are "key matters to be resolved," adding that any resolution requires approval by the Chinese government.
The Friday announcement provides TikTok with a bit of breathing room in what has been a bumpy year. A federal law took effect in January that legally banned the app nationwide unless it split away from its Beijing-based owner, ByteDance.
Congress passed the ban last year with overwhelming bipartisan support over national security fears that an app used by more than half of Americans should not be controlled by a company in China, a foreign adversary of the U.S. TikTok fought the ban all the way to the Supreme Court, calling it a violation of free speech rights — but the high court upheld the law.
Starting the evening of Jan. 18, just before the ban was planned to take effect, the app went dark for 14 hours. But it flickered back on the next day after Trump promised to sign an order delaying enforcement of the ban once he was sworn into office.
On Inauguration Day, Trump signed an executive order effectively pushing back the start of the ban by 75 days, and promising immunity for other tech companies that provide back end services for the app, such as Apple and Google, which host it in their web stores. That extension was set to expire on April 5.
The new order pushes it back by another 75 days.
Legal experts say Trump's delays in the form of executive orders run afoul of the federal TikTok ban law, which stipulates that certain conditions need to be met, like certifying that a divestiture from ByteDance is in motion, before moving to pause the law's start date. In other words, it is still technically illegal for TikTok to operate in the U.S., since it remains under the control of a Chinese company.
Yet moves by Trump and his administration assuring TikTok and its service providers that U.S. authorities will not prosecute anyone under the law have been enough for the popular app to stay online despite operating in violation of a federal statute.
Since January, Trump has said there has been "tremendous interest" from potential buyers of TikTok, an app used by more than 170 million Americans and a remarkably valuable asset for anyone who might want to influence a whole generation of young internet users who flock to the service every day.
NPR reported in January that cloud computing company Oracle has been tapped by the White House as a top contender to lead a coalition of other investors to acquire a sizable stake in TikTok's U.S. operation.
Oracle is run by Larry Ellison, a billionaire Republican donor who has long been a close ally of Trump.
During Trump's first term, when he attempted to ban TikTok, he selected Oracle to lead a take over effort that collapsed in part because it could not win the support of regulators in China.
Likewise, securing the approval of the Chinese government has been a key sticking point this time around, with TikTok insiders telling NPR that any sale blessing from Beijing could hinge on China landing some kind of relief from tariffs.
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