Marco Rubio Calls on Justice Department to Investigate TikTok CEO Shaw Zhi Chu for Misleading Congress

Senator Marco Rubio has called on the Justice Department to investigate TikTok CEO Shaw Zhi Chu for allegedly misleading Congress about where Americans’ data is stored.

Florida Republicans have asked the department to investigate whether Mr. Chu lied when he told lawmakers in March that the data of Americans was stored in the United States and Singapore, not in China. I would like to have one.

Rubio said he knew Mr. Chu’s testimony was false, making that point Wednesday in a letter to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland requesting a federal investigation.

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“Mr Chu should be held accountable for making false statements about material facts related to the operation of TikTok, as he appears to have done in this case,” Rubio said in the letter. “Therefore, we request an investigation into whether Mr. Chu committed perjury when he falsely stated that TikTok did not store user data of Americans in China, and we request that an investigation be conducted to determine whether Mr. Chu committed perjury when he falsely stated that TikTok did not store user data of Americans in China, and to inform the American public of the threat TikTok poses. We strongly urge transparency in the

TikTok said the leader wasn’t lying.

“We remain confident in the accuracy of Shaw’s testimony,” said TikTok spokesperson Brooke Overwetter on Thursday.

Rubio and other U.S. policymakers are concerned that American data on TikTok is vulnerable to China. They raise questions about where people’s information is stored and how the app’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, accesses the data.

China’s military-civilian fusion policy strengthens cooperation between corporations and the communist regime. But Chu said China has not requested TikTok data and his company has not provided the data to the Chinese government.

As part of avoiding an app ban in the US, TikTok plans to overhaul its data storage.

Mr. Chu said last month that an overhaul of the company’s U.S. operations, called Project Texas, was on track.

Chu told the Qatar Economic Forum in May, “Currently, by default, all US data is already stored on Oracle’s cloud servers, Oracle’s cloud infrastructure, and our own servers in Virginia and Singapore. It is no longer preserved.”

Responding to reports that TikTok employees shared personally identifiable information on ByteDance’s internal messaging tool from 2019 to 2022, TikTok spokesman Alex Howrek said last month that things had changed. .

He said that once Project Texas is complete, all communications involving US user data will take place on a platform managed by TikTok’s US team.

“Our efforts to remove historical data protected by US users are well underway and are expected to be completed later this year,” Howrek said in May.

The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday.