The Justice Department has officially decided that the federal law banning TikTok from government devices does not, in fact, apply to TikTok anymore. This is the same TikTok that Congress banned from government devices because it was owned by a Chinese company. The company is still partially owned by that Chinese company.
The Opinion Nobody Asked For (Except the White House)
On Thursday, the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel issued a 12-page written opinion concluding that a bipartisan 2022 law requiring executive branch agencies to remove TikTok from federal devices no longer applies to the current version of the app. The opinion was addressed to the deputy counsel to the president. The White House, for its part, declined to comment and pointed reporters back to the DOJ.
The OLC's core argument is that Congress only meant to ban the version of TikTok with "problematic ownership features," and that TikTok has since shed enough of those features to escape the law's reach. Six months ago, TikTok's U.S. operations moved into a new joint venture called TikTok U.S. Data Security, or TikTok USDS, made up mostly of American investors. The key word there is "mostly."
Beijing-based ByteDance still holds 19.9% of the new venture. Which is, just to be clear, not zero. The law capped foreign ownership at 20%, and ByteDance parked itself just one tenth of a percentage point under that threshold. The DOJ looked at this and said: close enough.
How We Got Here: A Brief History of Everyone Pretending to Care About This
Congress passed the 2022 device ban with bipartisan support, which these days is rarer than a coherent Trump press conference. The concern was straightforward: a social media app owned by a Chinese company could funnel data on federal employees to the Chinese government. TikTok always insisted this fear was overblown. Nobody believed them, at least not publicly.
Then in 2024, Congress escalated. They passed a law that would ban TikTok from the United States entirely unless ByteDance sold off its stake in the American version by January 2025. That law took effect one day before Trump's inauguration. And Trump, who had tried to ban TikTok himself during his first term, suddenly decided he loved TikTok and directed the Justice Department not to enforce the law while he worked on a deal.
The deal arrived last January. Oracle took a major stake in TikTok USDS. Oracle is chaired by Larry Ellison, whose son David Ellison runs Paramount, which is the parent company of CBS News, which broke this story. The internet is a small, incestuous place. Oracle promised to review TikTok's source code on an ongoing basis, and TikTok USDS promised cybersecurity controls intense enough to satisfy the national security concerns that drove three separate pieces of federal legislation. Lawmakers were, according to CBS News reporting, not entirely convinced.
What the DOJ Opinion Actually Says
The OLC opinion does not fully clear TikTok for use on every government device in America. Individual agencies still get to decide for themselves whether to allow the app, and they can still ban it for purely practical reasons like, say, not wanting their employees watching cooking videos during work hours. So there is that.
But the opinion does note, in what reads like a small tell, that the White House had already told executive branch employees they could download TikTok on official devices before this legal opinion was even finished. The OLC wrote that "you have since instructed that employees of Executive Branch agencies may download TikTok onto their official devices, subject to the agency's discretion." So the policy came first. The legal justification followed. The DOJ wrote 12 pages explaining why the thing that was already happening was fine.
The Lawsuits That Won't Go Away
Not everyone accepted the TikTok deal as sufficient. Investors tied to Alphabet and Meta, two companies that compete directly with TikTok for users and advertising dollars, sued the federal government arguing the ownership restructuring does not actually comply with the 2024 divestiture law. The federal government has asked for that case to be dismissed. As of this writing, CBS News reports the case is still pending.
There is an obvious conflict of interest argument lurking inside that lawsuit. TikTok's corporate rivals suing to enforce a law that would eliminate TikTok is not exactly a neutral act. But the underlying legal question is real: does a 19.9% ByteDance stake, a rebranded corporate structure, and some Oracle source-code audits actually address the national security concerns that multiple Congresses took seriously enough to legislate? The DOJ's answer is yes. A federal court has not yet weighed in.
The Dingo Take
Let's just say the quiet part out loud. The Trump administration wanted TikTok to survive because Trump likes TikTok, because TikTok's young user base was friendly to him during the 2024 campaign, and because a group of investors with ties to his orbit now have a financial stake in keeping the app alive and legal. The DOJ then produced a legal opinion that gave that preferred outcome a 12-page justification. That is not how the law is supposed to work. That is how the law works when you run it like a favor exchange.
The national security concerns that drove this ban were not invented by paranoid congressional staffers. China does use technology companies as intelligence collection tools. That is not a conspiracy theory. It is documented behavior. ByteDance still owns nearly a fifth of the company. The algorithm still runs. The data still flows. And now federal employees can put TikTok on their government phones, because the Justice Department retroactively decided the law everyone watched get passed does not mean what it says.
Maybe the new corporate structure genuinely addresses the risks. Maybe Oracle's source code reviews are ironclad. Maybe TikTok USDS is everything it promises to be. But the way to find out is not to have the White House instruct agencies to allow the app and then have the DOJ write a memo explaining why that instruction was legal all along. That is not legal analysis. That is cover.
