President Trump may end up pausing the ban on TikTok on Monday for the allowed 90-day period if certain conditions can be met.
He told this to NBC’s Kristen Welker in a phone interview today.
Essentially, there has to be a solid path to divesture for Trump to pause it and he’ll have to prove that to Congress if he does pause it.
Here’s more from NBC News:
President-elect Donald Trump told NBC News’ “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker in a phone interview Saturday that he will “most likely” give TikTok a 90-day reprieve from a potential ban in the U.S. after he takes office Monday.
Trump said he hadn’t made a final decision but was considering a 90-day extension of the Sunday deadline for TikTok’s China-based parent company to sell to a non-Chinese-buyer or face a U.S. ban.
“I think that would be, certainly, an option that we look at. The 90-day extension is something that will be most likely done, because it’s appropriate. You know, it’s appropriate. We have to look at it carefully. It’s a very big situation,” Trump said in the phone interview.
“If I decide to do that, I’ll probably announce it on Monday,” he said.
A 90-day extension is explicitly allowed for in a bipartisan law made last year under specific conditions. But an extension Monday may not be enough to avoid the app going dark for at least a day, because the current deadline for compliance is Sunday.
Under the law, the president can grant a one-time extension of 90 days if he certifies to Congress that three things are true: There’s a path to divestiture, there’s “significant progress” toward executing it and “there are in place the relevant binding legal agreements to enable execution of such qualified divestiture during the period of such extension.”
No such binding legal agreements have been made public. If a last-minute buyer came forward, they would likely need to spend tens of billions of dollars for TikTok’s U.S. operations.
Trump did not say whether he was aware of any recent progress toward a sale.
We know that Kevin O’Leary is part of a bid to buy TikTok but we don’t know if ByteDance will allow the sale of the company to them. Or if there are other buyers who they will sell to, should they even want to sell.
We know Trump wants the pause, given his plea to the Supreme Court, and my guess is that he’s busy trying to find out if he can meet the three conditions in the law for a 90-day pause.