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

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.

“American data has always been stored in Virginia and Singapore.”

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew in March 23 testimony to Congress

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.”

Read the full article at Forbes.com.