"Face the Nation," March 26, 2023
Interview
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Good morning, Margaret.
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We're now up to 22 Senators, 11 Democrats, 11 Republicans.
We've had strong interest from the House. I think they wanted to get through their hearing. And, clearly, while I appreciated Mr. Chew's testimony, he just couldn't answer the basic question. At the end of the day, TikTok is owned by a Chinese company, ByteDance. And by Chinese law, that company has to be willing to turn over data to the Communist Party.
Or one of my bigger fears, we got 150 million Americans on TikTok, average of about 90 minutes a day, and how that channel could be used for propaganda purposes...
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... or mis or dis-information advocated by the Communist Party.
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Well, I think the White House is very in favor of this bill.
We give the secretary of commerce the tools to ban, to force a sale, other tools. And, end of the day, one of the things that may lead to a ban is, the Chinese Communist Party has said they felt like the algorithm, the source code that resides in Beijing, is so important that they'd rather see a ban than give that source code up to be placed in a third country, which, again, I think speaks volumes about the potential threat that this application poses.
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Well, Margaret, I think there's a lot of creative activity that goes on, on TikTok, but I absolutely believe that the market -- if TikTok goes away, the market will provide another platform.
And, at the end of the day, that could be an American company. It could be a Brazilian company. It could be an Indian company. All those companies operate within a set of rule of law.
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I think...
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Listen, I have met with -- I have met -- I have met with Gina Raimondo on this issue.
I think she will make very clear that she believes TikTok is a threat as well. And, listen, if, at the end of the day, you could end up with a forced sale, and that forced sale also makes sure that the core algorithm, the source code, resides someplace different than China, that could be an outcome that would be successful as well.
At the end of the day, you cannot have American data collected, nor can you have the ability for the Communist Party to use TikTok as a propaganda tool.
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Well, that's one of the reasons why I think our approach, the RESTRICT Act, says, rather than dealing with TikTok in a one- off fashion, or, a few years back, it was Huawei, the Chinese telecom provider, or years earlier, the Russian software company Kaspersky.
We need to have a set of tools, rules-based, so they can stand up in court -- TikTok would still did its day in court, even under our law -- that says, if there's a foreign technology from a place like China and Russia, and it poses a national security threat. And one of the things we also require is that the intelligence community has to declassify as much of this information as possible.
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So it's not simply like, hey, trust the government. We got to make the case.
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If it ends up that a stress test that would have been applied to these midsize banks would have spotted this, of course, I would add additional regulation.
I think, though, what it appears to me is, two things happened. One, basic banking regulation, if this has been only a $5 billion bank, not a $200 billion bank, should have spotted the fact that this management and the regulators missed basic banking 101, the interest rate mismatch.
And, two, one of the things that I think we also have to look at is, this was the first time we've had an Internet-based run. There was literally $42 billion...
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... taken out of this bank in six hours. That's the equivalent of 25 cents on the dollar.
And I would like to know why some of the venture capitalists spurred this run in the first place.
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We're going to hear the facts on Tuesday. And if there's malfeasance at the bank, of course, I'm going to give the money back.
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Mm-hmm.
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We need more information about these documents.
And, more importantly, we need to make sure that what the intel community has done to mitigate the harm. And we're still in conversations with the Justice Department. The administration's position does not -- does not pass the smell test. We've got a job, not to go into the legal ramifications, but to make sure that the intelligence community has done what's right.
And we've got some additional tools. We can restrict some of the spending. We're in active conversations with the Justice Department. But we've got to get those documents.
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Source