When anyone tells you, Oh, China doesn't control TikTok, I want you to look at them straight in the face and start laughing. Tiktok's parent company, ByteDance, is Chinese-run. Now, this matters because TikTok is not just for fashion trends or cool workout tips. That's just the catnip to draw you in. China wants TikTok to be America's number one site for news, opinion, and yes, cultural change.

If they said, We want you to put out videos that make Americans fight with each other or spread conspiracy theories and get them at each other's throat, bite dance can't go to Chinese court and fight the Communist Party. They would have to do it.

That's my understanding. I would just add that that influence operation or the different kinds of influence operations you're describing are extraordinarily difficult to detect, which is part of what makes the national security concerns represented by by TikTok so significant.

Senator, good to see you tonight. Influence operations, data collection, even geo-location efforts, algorithms that suppress certain views and inflate others. How can any American in any position of power not move immediately to force this 100% sale of the company TikTok from the Communist Chinese? How's there anyone against this?

Because TikTok is popular. People like it. The reason why they like it. What makes TikTok so good is that it has this artificial intelligence that knows you better than you know yourself. It's literally reading your mind. The more you use it, the more it knows about you. The problem is not that TikTok has that. The problem is that ByteDance and their engineers in China are the ones that own that artificial intelligence. No matter where you put my data or anybody, I don't use TikTok, but people that use TikTok, no matter where you store that data, you could store it in a safe in the United States. Those engineers in China have to have access to the data, but they control the brain of TikTok. They control that artificial intelligence. The point I made today, and the FBI director agreed, is if the Chinese Communist Party goes to them and says, We want you to defeat Donald Trump. We want you to put out messages that are anti-Trump and pro-B Biden, ByteDance has to do it. It doesn't matter that they're a company in China. By Chinese law, they have to do it. If they say, We want the data of all your users that live in Florida, they have to give it to them.

They don't have a choice but to do it. That is Chinese law. As long as ByteDance owns the artificial intelligence that powers TikTok, we got a Trojan horse living inside our country.

Now, Senator, your colleague, Rand Paul, weighed in on the TikTok debate, writing on X over the weekend that if Congress bans TikTok, they will be acting just like the Chinese communists who have also banned TikTok. Why not just defend the First Amendment? That's an easy one. Your response?

Well, there's no First Amendment issue here. We're not going after TikTok because of what the video videos say it's because of the company's conduct, the conduct of their parent company. Their parent company is under the complete control, period, of a foreign government that's hostile to the United States. The day they decide to weaponize that against us, to convince soldiers not to go fight, to convince their families that it's not worth going to fight, to get involved in our elections, to spread things that make us fight against each other and further divide this country or keep us distracted, or to convince American teenagers to kill themselves because the world's about to end. They have to do it. If the Chinese tell them to do it, they have to do it. It's the conduct, not the content that we're talking about. If TikTok was just a website where people could give their opinions, it's the control by the Communist Party. It's that conduct that we're going after.

Well, but it's our adversary, our most powerful adversary. We're just giving them all this information because they got some well-healed lobbyists on Capitol Hill. They spent a lot of money on that. I know there are reports that President Trump recently met with this hedge fund manager named Jeff Yass. He's a major league investor in TikTok. Trump has, reportedly, which shocked me since, reversed his position on banning the app. His former advisor and a friend of this program, Kelli Ann Conway, is also apparently working to lobby people on Capitol Hill for TikTok. It pains me to talk about this because I like them both very much.

What's going on here? Well, I haven't talked to the President about it. What I read is that he said that, and it's valid that Facebook will now become more powerful than all these other... But that's a separate problem, and we should confront that problem, too. I don't like the fact that Facebook and Google and all these people have all that power. We should confront that problem, too. But the answer to that problem is not to have a Chinese Communist Party-controlled company in the marketplace. Those are two separate problems, and I think we need to deal with both of them. Like I said, this is not for me. Listen, if TikTok decides we're no longer going to associate with ByteDance, we're going to find another company not controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, they're going to provide us the algorithm and the AI from now on, problem solved. The problem is they won't do that. They can't do that, or they don't want to do that because ByteDance is a parent company, and they're in China. Why would they give up 100 something million Americans whose phones they are in? Why would they voluntarily give that up?

The Rand Paul First Amendment argument is laughably bad, and he's a smart guy, so he's got to just drop that. All right, Senator, since Trump is the presumptive nominee, he's going to soon be receiving the sensitive intelligence briefings, which every nominee of a party receives. But the usual suspects are very unhappy about this. Watch.

I have to hope, and knowing the intelligence community as I do, that they will dumb down the briefing for Donald Trump. That is, they will give him no more information than absolutely necessary. We can't trust that he will do the right thing with that information. I think it's going to be analysis that will be devoid of the sources and methods, the sensitive things that we are most concerned about. They're not going to get into any type of detail.

Senator, your reaction to this?

These people are just yapping. He needs to have the exact same intelligence that any other candidate would have, and in this case, being a former president, some of the stuff we already know and have a background in. Anything short of that is election interference, in my view. Just one more example of how these people are so deranged in their hatred of Donald Trump, that basically want to treat him differently than any other candidate that's ever been the nominee of one of our two major parties.

Senator, your name has come up recently in conversations that I've had with people who know probably more than I do about the vice presidency. Would that be something you would consider?

Well, I don't think you ever... You have an opportunity to serve your country at that capacity. You don't just belittle or walk away from it. It's certainly not something I've talked to anybody about, and it's not something because I have a job here and I'm trying to concentrate on my job. Look, Donald Trump is going to make a good decision. He's going to pick a good person. He has a lot of good people to pick from. My good friend Tim Scott has been talked a lot about. There's JD Vance. You're too gracious. You're so gracious. Listen, we're very fortunate. We have a lot of really talented people in the Republican Party. You look at the Democrats, Kamala Harris is their vice President. Who would they replace her with if they wanted to? Who would they replace Biden with if they wanted to? The guy who runs Communists California.

Nice pivot there, Senator. But it's an interesting idea. It's great to see you, as always.

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