Waltz: ‘We’re confident that we can save TikTok, but also protect Americans’
Incoming national security adviser Mike Waltz said on Sunday that President-elect Trump is committed to saving TikTok while ensuring Americans are safe.
In an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Waltz said the incoming president is working in “literally real time, working with the various tech companies” to “get it back online and buy him some time to, one, save it, but protect Americans' data and protect Americans from any type of foreign interference.”
“What’s interesting here is, this is about bridging from Sunday to Monday. This is about giving the tech companies, the app stores, the providers, the cloud storage and others, the confidence that we are going to work towards some type of deal and to not make this go dark. And I think that's what you're going to see in the upcoming 24 hours.
“The president needs optionality, and he wants it, to evaluate deals that are in accordance with the law but also protect our national security. And that's what we'll see,” Waltz said.
A 90-day extension is allowed as part of a bipartisan bill passed by Congress last April, which gave TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance 270 days to divest from the app or face a ban from U.S. app stores.
On the risk of a 90-extension, Waltz said he doesn’t want the FBI or “the Chinese Communist Party looking at my passwords… or what's going on in my data, or certainly not influencing 170 million Americans, but it is a fantastic app. It's something that 170 million Americans enjoy, and we're confident that we can save TikTok, but also protect Americans' data and protect them from influence.”
Waltz said the incoming Trump team is looking at different ways to make sure that’s possible, “whether that's an outright sale, whether that's some mechanism of firewalls to make sure that the data is protected here on US soil, that's what the President will be evaluating.”