WASHINGTON, March 5 - President Donald Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi were named in a lawsuit filed on Thursday that contests the U.S. government’s approval of a transaction by ByteDance, the Chinese owner of TikTok, to form a joint venture in which a majority stake would be held by American interests.
The complaint was lodged in the U.S. Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia by the Public Integrity Project. The organization brought the suit on behalf of two retail U.S. investors who hold stakes in rival social media companies. According to the filing, the approval was unlawful and failed to satisfy the conditions set out in a 2024 statute.
The plaintiffs ask the court to require a renegotiation of the deal. The filing sets out an explicit objective for such renegotiation: to ensure the arrangement does not place administration allies "in a position to censor political content on one of the world’s most popular media platforms."
"that doesn’t put administration allies in a position to censor political content on one of the world’s most popular media platforms."
The lawsuit, as described in the filing, does not seek an injunction or other court order that would amount to a ban on TikTok. The filing notes that roughly 200 million Americans use the platform.
The action centers on two legal assertions present in the complaint: first, that the government’s approval of the proposed corporate structure was illegal; and second, that the approval fell short of the requirements established by the 2024 law cited in the complaint. Beyond those core allegations, the plaintiffs frame their request narrowly around renegotiation intended to address concerns about political-content control.
Those named as defendants in the suit are the President and the Attorney General, reflecting the plaintiffs’ challenge to actions taken at the federal-government level. The case is pending in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
Because the filing explicitly declines to pursue a ban, the dispute as presented in the complaint focuses on the lawfulness of the approval and the form of the transaction rather than on immediate efforts to remove the platform from the U.S. market.