Trump administrator suspends TikTok ban he appears to have forgotten

The Commerce Department has suspended enforcement of an executive order that would have forced the popular short video app TikTok to suspend all U.S. operations from midnight tonight. It is a tacit admission that the proposed ban is no longer particularly important to the administration.

The Commerce Department said orders against TikTok are being stayed “pending further legal developments” in multiple lawsuits, the Wall Street Journal reports.

President Donald Trump signed two executive orders relating to TikTok earlier this year. The first, on August 7, declared the application a national emergency. A second (PDF), released a week later, gave ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, 90 days to sell the app to a US owner.

That deadline fell today, November 12th. And while ByteDance has yet to divest any part of TikTok, it has some sort of deal in place with Oracle that the White House seemed to more or less agree with after its announcement in September.

ByteDance filed an appeal in Federal Court earlier this week asking for more time to complete the Oracle deal. In short, ByteDance said it has acted on its end of the deal – now it just needs the U.S. government to remember what’s going on.

“For a year, TikTok has actively engaged with CFIUS in good faith to address its national security concerns, even as we disagree with its assessment,” TikTok said in a statement Tuesday. . “In the nearly two months since the President gave his preliminary approval to our proposal to address these concerns, we have offered detailed solutions to finalize this agreement, but we have not received any substantive feedback on our extensive data privacy and security framework.

Meanwhile, thanks to all of these “ongoing lawsuits,” the administration was already banned from enforcing some of its TikTok bans today.

TikTok filed suit against the government shortly after the decrees were signed. In September, Judge Carl Nichols of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia allowed TikTok’s injunction, ruling that the government had likely exceeded its legal authority in crafting the ban.

A group of content creators who make a living using TikTok have also filed a lawsuit against the administration, alleging the ban would fundamentally destroy their livelihoods. In late October, Judge Wendy Beetlestone of the US District Court for Eastern Pennsylvania agreed, ruling that a judgment would cause creators “significant and irrecoverable economic loss” and granting an injunction against the ban.