Exclusive: TikTok CEO Should Be Investigated By DOJ, Senator Says

The top Republican on the Senate Intel Committee is calling on the Justice Department to “investigate whether Chew committed perjury” in his testimony before Congress, citing new reporting by Forbes.

Republican Senator Marco Rubio has asked Attorney General Merrick Garland to open a Justice Department investigation into whether TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew committed perjury in his recent congressional testimony on the company’s handling of American users’ data.

“We now know that TikTok stored sensitive information about its American users in China—a fact that Chew denied under oath,” Rubio, the Vice Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote to Garland on Wednesday. The letter, shared exclusively with Forbes, cites a recent Forbes investigation that revealed that TikTok has stored the most sensitive financial information of its biggest American and European stars—including those in the TikTok Creator Fund—on servers in China, where it’s been accessible to employees. (TikTok stores tax forms, social security numbers and other personal data to pay creators who earn money for their content and outside vendors that work with the company. Those payments are managed through various internal tools from TikTok’s China-based parent ByteDance.)

The reporting drew on internal communications, audio recordings, videos, screenshots and documents marked “Privileged and Confidential” obtained by Forbes, as well as several people across different parts of the company familiar with the matter. The findings appear to contradict Chew’s statements to Congress in March that TikTok’s U.S. user data has been stored on physical servers outside China.

Asked by Michigan Republican Tim Walberg about whether ByteDance employees in Beijing currently have access to American data, Chew said at the hearing that “yes, the Chinese engineers do have access to global data” for business purposes. But he emphasized that American data was stored outside of China. “Storage has always been in Virginia and Singapore, the physical servers,” he explained. “The American data has always been stored in Virginia and Singapore in the past, and access of this is on an as-required basis by our engineers globally.”

In light of the Forbes reporting, Rubio called the statements “evidence that TikTok CEO, Shou Zi Chew, perjured himself.”

“We now know those statements are false, and that some sensitive data from American users was in fact stored in China, where, by law, that information could be accessed by the Chinese Communist Party,” he wrote.

“Chew should be held accountable for making false statements about material facts related to TikTok’s operation, as he appears to have done in this case,” the senator wrote to Attorney General Garland. “I therefore request that you investigate whether Chew committed perjury when he falsely stated that TikTok has not stored the user data of Americans in China.”

Other China hawks who, like Rubio, have called for a TikTok ban expressed concern about the Forbes report on Twitter. “He lied to Congress. That’s perjury,” said Jacob Helberg, a member of the bipartisan U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission created by Congress. “But more importantly American data & national security are compromised.”

Lawmakers across both political parties disagree about the best path forward for TikTok because a ban would deal a blow to creators, businesses and the American economy and it likely would not protect the troves of American data that has already been collected, as was the case in India. TikTok could also mount several legal battles to fight back. The company is already suing Montana after the state passed a law to ban the app there.

TikTok and ByteDance did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Rubio’s public statement calling for a DOJ investigation. TikTok spokesperson Alex Haurek said last week that “we remain confident in the accuracy of Shou’s testimony.” Since then, neither company has answered basic questions about whether U.S. citizens’ sensitive financial data is or has been stored and accessible in China. They also did not respond to questions about how many people at the companies can access creators and vendors’ payment information, where those employees are located and whether there has been unauthorized access to that data.

Along with touting plans to cordon off American user data from China in Project Texas, TikTok has also made similar arrangements for European user data through what it calls Project Clover. But Forbes found that TikTok has also stored the payment information of people in TikTok’s EU Creator Fund on servers in China, which could be problematic under Europe’s stringent privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation.

“Even if TikTok was not a subsidiary of a Chinese company,” said Bryan Cunningham, a former national security lawyer for the White House and CIA, “this would be pretty alarming IT security malpractice.”