Monday, July 07, 2025
Israel’s Deadly Assault on Iran Prison Incites Fury, Even Among Dissidents
Israel’s Deadly Assault on Iran Prison Incites Fury, Even Among Dissidents
“Israel’s airstrikes on Iran’s Evin prison, including the hospital ward, resulted in widespread condemnation and fury, even among the Iranian regime’s critics. The strikes, which occurred during a working day, killed 79 people, including visitors, social workers, lawyers, physicians, and nurses, and injured dozens more. The attack, which damaged several prison buildings and surrounding areas, was described as a war crime by human rights organizations and sparked calls for the release of political prisoners.
The June 23 airstrikes on Evin prison, including the hospital ward, have turned it from a hated symbol of oppression into a new rallying cry against Israel, even among the Iranian regime’s domestic critics.
By Farnaz FassihiParin Behrooz and Leily Nikounazar
Farnaz Fassihi has lived in Iran and has covered the country for three decades and was a war correspondent in the Middle East for 15 years.
Ceilings, walls and wooden cabinets collapsed into heaps of jagged debris in the prison’s visitor center. Scorched papers and brightly colored case files lay scattered amid broken bricks and tangled wires in the administration building. Shattered glass covered patient beds and equipment in the infirmary.
Evin prison in Tehran stands out in Iran as a singular symbol of oppression, its notorious reputation reaching far beyond the country’s borders. For five decades, Iran’s rulers, from the shah to the clerics, have used Evin as the place to punish dissent with detention, interrogation, torture and execution.
When Israel struck the prison with missiles on June 23, the attack generated widespread condemnation and fury in Iran, even among opponents of the authoritarian government.
The strikes were the deadliest of the 12-day Israel-Iran war. Iran has said 79 people were killed and dozens injured in the Evin attack, but casualty numbers are expected to rise.
Among the dead and wounded were visiting family members of prisoners, social workers, a lawyer, physicians and nurses, a 5-year-old child, teenage soldiers guarding the doors as part of mandatory military service, administrative staff and residents of the area, according to Iranian media reports, activists and rights groups.
About 100 transgender inmates are missing after their section of the prison was flattened, and the authorities say they are presumed dead, said Reza Shafakhah, a prominent human rights lawyer, who added that the government often treats being transgender as a crime. The chief prosecutor of the prison, Ali Ghanaatkar, despised by government critics for his handling of political prisoners, and one of his deputies also were killed.
The Israeli military declined to comment about the purpose of the attack on Evin or the casualties. Israeli officials have described the attack on Evin as “symbolic.” Foreign Minister Gideon Saar, in a social media post, suggested that it was both retaliation for Iranian missile strikes on civilian structures, and somehow an act of liberation.
But in Iran, prisoners, families, activists and lawyers said that Israel’s action had shown total disregard for the lives and safety of the prisoners. They said the timing of the attack, at noon during a working day, also meant that the prison had been full of visitors, lawyers, medical and administrative staff.
Narges Mohammadi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who is Iran’s most prominent human rights activist, said in a statement that Israel’s attack “carried out in broad daylight, in front of families and visitors, is clearly a war crime.” Ms. Mohammadi has spent decades in and out of Evin, and is currently out on furlough.
Siamak Namazi, a 53-year-old Iranian American businessman who was detained in Evin for eight years on espionage charges that the United States and rights groups described as bogus, said that prisoners, like many ordinary Iranians, feel trampled by two ruthless powers.
“What I hear from prisoners and my friends there is that they feel stuck between the two blades of a scissors, the evil regime that imprisons and tortures them and a foreign force dropping bombs on their heads in the name of freedom,” he said.
Amnesty International has called on Iran to immediately release political prisoners, and said in its Persian social media account that Israel’s attack on Evin could constitute a war crime. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights spokesman Thameen Al-Kheetan called the attack “a grave breach of international humanitarian law.”
This account of what transpired at Evin during and just after Israel’s attack is based on interviews with more than a dozen families of prisoners, lawyers representing them, former prisoners in contact with current ones, written testimonies from current prisoners, photos and videos by independent journalists and Iranian media reports.
The Attack
At around noon on a sweltering summer day, Leila Jaffarzadeh, 35, the mother of a year-old baby girl, arrived at Evin clutching a bag of documents. The authorities had agreed to furlough her husband, Milad Khedmati, jailed on financial charges.
Ms. Jaffarzadeh was on the phone with her husband as she approached the visitor center when the first explosions rocked the prison. She screamed, telling him, “they are bombing, bomb, bomb, bomb,” then the line went dead. Shrapnel had pierced her brain, killing her, said her brother-in-law, Hossein Khedmati, a writer and poet, in an interview from Tehran.
Reaching the scene within an hour, Hossein Khedmati said, he saw smoke, flames and carnage in every direction — broken and dead bodies, shredded clothes and loose shoes scattered in the debris. Emergency responders carried the injured on stretchers to ambulances.
He found his sister-in-law in a body bag. “I can’t fathom that Leila is no longer with us and Nila will grow up without her mother,” he said. “Telling my brother his wife was dead was the hardest thing I have done in my life.”
Zahra Ebadi, a social worker at the prison, could not find child care on thatday, so she took her 5-year-old son, Mehrad, to work. He was playing in the visitor area while his mother finished some paperwork in an office, according to her cousin, Tahereh Pajouhesh, who was interviewed by the Shargh Daily newspaper.
After the first blast, Ms. Ebadi ran to find her son, but another explosion killed her, Ms. Pajouhesh said. A male colleague had grabbed Mehrad to shield him, but debris crushed and killed both of them. Four other female social workers also were killed, according to Iranian media reports.
Mina, 53, said she had been talking by phone with her son who is serving a five-year sentence in Evin for political activism. The call cut off abruptly. She redialed, again and again. When he finally answered he told her the prison had been attacked, she said, and she headed for the prison. Mina asked that her last name and the name of her son not be published out of fear of retribution.
“My legs went numb and my body started shaking. I don’t know how I got myself to Evin despite all the obstacles,” Mina said in a telephone interview. “Security guards wouldn’t let me get through. Other family members were there too. I eventually got myself to the strike site by yelling and screaming.” She said she counted at least 15 dead bodies on the ground.
Iranian news media reported that at least two locations in the prison had been hit directly, the three-story visitor center near the main entrance, which also housed the prosecutor’s office, and the 47-bed hospital clinic inside the compound. Forensic Architecture, a research agency that specializes in visual investigations, said on Friday that its analysis of satellite images showed at least six strikes on Evin, four confirmed by photos taken at the scene, including hits on several of the prison’s dormitories. The library, the grocery shop, the warehouse storing food and the infamous 209 ward controlled by intelligence forces were also destroyed.
Iran’s police force said it had detonated two unexploded missiles in the area of Evin, according to Iranian media reports.
The blasts also extensively damaged surrounding residential and commercial buildings and vehicles, photographs and videos showed.
A photographer who visited the prison on the Sunday after the June 23 attack described a pungent smell from burned and decaying flesh in the rubble. Iranian media reported that the morgue was using DNA tests to identify body parts and corpses burned beyond recognition.
“The prisoners lived in constant fear, believing each moment could be their last,” said Nasrine Setoudeh, a prominent lawyer and former Evin prisoner whose husband and fellow political activist, Reza Khandan, was detained there. “It took an hour for Reza to call and confirm he was safe. That hour felt like an eternity.”
The Aftermath
The families of four political prisoners have released the inmates’ detailed accounts of the strikes and their aftermath, either in statements shared with The New York Times or on social media. They are Abolfazl Ghadyani and Mehdi Mahmoudian, two prominent political dissidents; Mostafa Tajzadeh, a former minister of the interior who is a vocal critic of the government, and Mr. Khandan, Ms. Setoudeh’s husband.
In addition, 13 other prisoners made a joint statement, others have released more general accounts and four female prisoners told BBC Persian of events inside the women’s section.
They all described sudden, all-encompassing chaos: Buildings rocked walls crumbled, windows shattered, doors blew off hinges, smoke and dust clouded the air, and people lay bloodied — shouting for help if they were conscious.
A group of male prisoners ran into the courtyard and found the clinic in flames. The warehouse storing food and personal hygiene supplies was ravaged. Prisoners from the solitary confinement building and their guards wandered outside through blown out doors, dazed.
The four women told the BBC that for more than three hours no outside help arrived and phone lines were cut. They tended to the wounded and cleaned up shards of glass and other debris.
Mr. Tajzadeh told his wife, Fakhri Mohtashamipour, that he had been pacing the hallway on his daily exercise when the first bombs detonated, and would have died if he had been inside his cell, which was flattened. She said in an interview that he managed a quick phone call to her that evening saying the prison had lost power, water and gas, and prisoners were forced to huddle in the dark, in a half-collapsed building.
In the first few hours prisoners helped with recovery efforts. They recounted evacuating survivors from the clinic and digging through rubble with their hands, uncovering about 20 bodies. According to a statement by Mr. Mahmoudian and Mr. Ghadyani, among those severely injured was a female physician, whom they identified only as Dr. Makarem, an infectious disease specialist who lost an arm and leg and who had volunteered at the prison clinic once a week.
In the afternoon, they said, security forces had swarmed the prison, and at gunpoint forced the men helping with rescue operations to go back inside.
Late that night, male prisoners were shackled in pairs at the wrists and ankles, and marched out, again at gunpoint. Those who wrote detailed accounts said each was allowed a plastic bag with whatever remained of their belongings.
They clambered in the dark through the ruins of the prison, over tangled wires, broken bricks and dead bodies. Some people collapsed. Some cried. It took more than an hour to reach the evacuation buses awaiting them through a back opening because the front gate was impassable, a distance that would normally take five minutes.
“We marched in the tunnel of horror, our feet chained, our hands clutching plastic bags with some of our belongings, forming a lone line through the rubble,” said Mr. Ghadyani and Mr. Mahmoudian in their joint statement. “Here, caught between two threats, we are victims and hostages.”
Mr. Khandan, a human-rights activist and graphic designer by trade, said the chains cut into his flesh with every step and he fell several times. He also abandoned the plastic bag containing his belongings, finding it impossible to carry it with chained hands.
As the prisoners reached the buses around 3 a.m., he said, a new round of Israeli attacks erupted, along with the firing of Iranian air defenses. “Fear overcame us. It was impossible to move fast and take shelter because our hands and legs were tied to one another,” Mr. Khandan said.
The convoy of buses, escorted by security vehicles, eventually departed, snaking its way amid airstrikes to Fashafouyeh prison, a facility on the outskirts of Tehran, known for unsanitary, overcrowded conditions. Mr. Khandan said they arrived at 8 a.m., about 20 hours after the attack, not having received food or water since the security forces arrived.
Female prisoners also were evacuated by force, shackled in pairs, and transferred to Gharchak prison, a different overcrowded facility on Tehran’s outskirts the following morning. Fariba Kamalabadi, a Baha’i faith leader serving a 20-year sentence, told her family that conditions for the women had deteriorated so badly, “I wish we had died with the missiles,” her daughter told BBC Persian.
The judiciary says Evin is now empty.
Mr. Shafakhah, the lawyer representing some of the political prisoners, said, “We can assume Evin prison is closed forever, but oppression is not limited to a location, they will continue elsewhere.”
Farnaz Fassihi is the United Nations bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of the organization. She also covers Iran and has written about conflict in the Middle East for 15 years.“
Sunday, July 06, 2025
Saturday, July 05, 2025
Trump is waging war against the media – and winning
Trump is waging war against the media – and winning
“Bernie Sanders, the venerable democratic socialist senator from Vermont, was not in a mood to pull punches.
“Trump is undermining our democracy and rapidly moving us towards authoritarianism, and the billionaires who care more about their stock portfolios than our democracy are helping him do it,” he fumed in a statement last week.
Such outbursts have been common in recent months as Sanders has taken up a leading position opposing Donald Trump’s second term, and flagging his concern that the president is waging a war against the media – and winning.
The reason for his ire last week was highly specific: a deal struck by Paramount, the corporate parent of CBS News, to pay Trump $16m in a donation to his presidential library, the archival centers that many presidents set up after they leave office.
The settlement puts an end to the US president’s lawsuit over the network’s editing of an interview on 60 Minutes, the flagship CBS news magazine show, with then vice-president Kamala Harris during the 2024 election. Trump claimed – without any serious evidence – that the edit of the interview betrayed bias against him.
60 Minutes journalists countered – and nearly all other observers agreed – that it was just standard editing, common to all major interview segments.
So then why settle? The key may lie with the fact that the super-wealthy Redstone family, which owns Paramount, is seeking to gain approval from Trump administration regulators for an $8bn deal to sell Paramount to the movie studio Skydance – a deal in which they stand to profit with a $2.4bn payday.
“Paramount may have closed this case, but it opened the door to the idea that the government should be the media’s editor-in-chief,” said lawyer Bob Corn-Revere of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
No wonder Sanders was mad. He has warned that the Paramount deal “will only embolden” Trump to continue attacking, suing and intimidating the media which the US president has repeatedly labeled “the enemy of the people”. It was, Sanders said, a “dark day for independent journalism and freedom of the press”.
Many would agree. For as Trump’s second presidency has unfolded amid chaos, vast cuts to government spending and a rollback of civil liberties, his repeated and blistering attacks on the press have been one of the things most worrying those who fear for America’s democratic health.
The US media is now in a deep crisis of the sort that observers of creeping autocracy in places such as Hungary might find familiar. For the Paramount deal is not alone. The settlement follows another, six months ago, when Disney – which owns ABC News – put to bed a legal claim over how George Stephanopoulos, one of its top news anchors, described the president’s sexual assault of the magazine writer E Jean Carroll. Again, the payment was $16m.
He is even pursuing a legal claim against a relatively tiny newspaper for printing a poll he didn’t like: Trump’s lawsuit against the Iowa pollster Ann Selzer accuses her and the Des Moines Register of fraud, after she conducted a poll right before the 2024 election that showed Kamala Harris leading in Iowa, a state which she did not ultimately win.
Last week the Trump administration also threatened legal action against no less a news giant than CNN, over its reporting on an app that warns users of nearby immigration enforcement agents. As the administration continues its mass deportation efforts, the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, said her department and the Department of Justice are now examining the idea of prosecuting the network.
“We’re working with the Department of Justice to see if we can prosecute them,” Noem said of CNN, “because what they’re doing is actively encouraging people to avoid law enforcement activities and operations. We’re going to actually go after them and prosecute them. What they’re doing is illegal.”
Trump then added, seemingly for good measure, that he believed the network’s reporting on the success – or lack thereof – of the US bombing on Iran could also be examined. “Our people have to be celebrated, [and] not come home to ‘What do you mean we didn’t hit the targets?’” Then he crystallised his entire approach: “You have scum. CNN is scum. MSDNC [his insult for MSNBC] is scum. The New York Times is scum. They’re bad people. They’re sick.”
But if Trump is determined to wage a fierce crackdown on the press in the US, in some high-profile quarters it has been met with a distinct lack of resistance – especially from news organizations whose owners are billionaires or large corporations, keenly aware of Trump’s control of the nation’s regulators and their power to make or break a company’s fortunes.
Indeed, while the legal settlements with Trump represent a compromise of press freedoms, they may also represent an economic reality: that news outlets are more of a curse than a blessing to the multibillion-dollar media corporations that own them.
The billionaire owners of both the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post – the biotech mogul Patrick Soon-Shiong and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, respectively – have conspicuously moved their once-powerful newspapers closer to Trump and his Maga movement. Their opinion sections, both once fierce havens for Trump critics, have been the subject of particular attention by their owners – and the outraged resignation letters of staff have appeared to make little impact.
“A generation ago this would have seemed an outrageous story in the history of journalism,” said Bob Thompson, a media professor at Syracuse University.
Not now in Trump’s America. It is a two-pronged spear: even as Trump and his administration have launched an unprecedented attack, at the same time significant parts of the US media have seen its owners and power brokers often fold their hands.
The head of Reporters Without Borders, Clayton Weimers, said: “A line is being drawn between the owners of American news media who are willing to stand up for press freedom, and those who capitulate to the demands of the president.”
Jameel Jaffer, the director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said: “Calling these ‘settlements’ doesn’t quite capture what’s happening. It’s more like surrender – or even payoff.”
The Trump administration has even signaled precisely that. Brendan Carr, Trump’s handpicked chair for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) – which holds the reins over whether the Redstone family gets its $2.4bn payday – said in an interview last year that “the news distortion complaint over the 60 Minutes transcript is something that is likely to arise in the context of the FCC review of that transaction”, referring to the Paramount-Skydance deal.
The Democratic party, without power and shouting from the sidelines, is furious. The leftwing Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday called for an investigation into the Paramount settlement.
“With Paramount folding to Donald Trump at the same time the company needs his administration’s approval for its billion-dollar merger, this could be bribery in plain sight,” Warren said in a statement.
The settlement, she said, exposed “a glaring need for rules to restrict donations to sitting presidents’ libraries” – referring to the Trump entities that both ABC and CBS said their settlement payments would be directed – and added that “the Trump administration’s level of sheer corruption is appalling, and Paramount should be ashamed of putting its profits over independent journalism”.
In May, Warren, Sanders and their fellow senator Ron Wyden sent a letter to the Paramount CEO, Shari Redstone, cautioning her that “under the federal bribery statute, it is illegal to corruptly give anything of value to public officials to influence an official act”.
But prosecutors in the state of Delaware, where Paramount is incorporated, appear unlikely to open an investigation.
Perhaps most chilling has been Trump’s ongoing attack on the Associated Press, the news agency that is generally relied on to announce the winners and losers of individual elections, up to and including the presidency. When Trump ordered the Gulf of Mexico renamed to “Gulf of America”, and the AP continued to use both names – noting that the rest of the world still uses the original – Trump jumped on it as a pretext to ban AP reporters from the White House.
The AP has sued, but whatever the result, Trump’s attempt to undermine the impartiality credentials of an organisation that is crucial to letting the American people know who their next president is may prove even more dangerous in the long run. And while AP remains banned, official coverage of White House activities has been opened to various new media individuals and groups with no history of impartial journalism at all, and who appear to be selected entirely for their willingness to ask Trump sycophantic questions.
The political and legal assault could hardly have come at a worse time for American journalism, either, which is assailed by economic headwinds that would be challenging even under a more friendly administration. Scores of once healthy and powerful regional newspapers and television stations have declined or closed. News deserts have appeared all over the country.
Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
Big TV names – such as CNN and its rival MSNBC – are being jettisoned by the owners that once provided a safe haven for them, and few expect the good economic times to return as the rise of social media giants and artificial intelligence chokes off advertising and revenue streams for a public increasingly sceptical of mainstream media.
Meanwhile, some of the fresh new digital startups that were meant to take their place have either shrunk themselves or been axed. Names such as BuzzFeed, HuffPost and Vice News that were once darlings of the digital media world are pale shadows of their former selves, unlikely to provide any sort of bulwark against Trump while mired in economic difficulties. One of the few booming parts of the US media landscape? Fox News, the Trump-boosting conservative channel owned by Rupert Murdoch and his family.
“Part of the various crises in journalism, from the business model to the interference of an aggressive presidential administration, is that so much of journalism are in fact little compartments in huge corporate entities for whom the standards of American journalism, the first amendment, the obligation to inform the citizenry in a republic, are not at the top of their priorities,” Thompson said.
“It’s no surprise that we would have constant conflicts of interest when news organisations are owned by enormous, multivalent corporations that have got a lot of other interests besides telling the truth in journalism.”
In this world, the Trump administration’s role in the crisis of US journalism is not as singular villain, but as just one more factor in an area of American civic life that was already deeply ailing and standing near the edge of a cliff. Trump and his allies have just started pushing it closer.
“As it collapses before our very eyes, we might be surprised that it didn’t happen a long time ago,” Thompson said.“
Friday, July 04, 2025
How the Trump Administration Justified Ignoring the TikTok Ban - The New York Times
Trump Claims Sweeping Power to Nullify Laws, Letters on TikTok Ban Show
"In purporting to license otherwise illegal conduct by tech firms, President Trump set a precedent expanding executive power, legal experts warned.
Charlie Savage has been writing about presidential power and legal policy for more than two decades. He reported from Washington.
Attorney General Pam Bondi told tech companies that they could lawfully violate a statute barring American companies from supporting TikTok based on a sweeping claim that President Trump has the constitutional power to set aside laws, newly disclosed documents show.
In letters to companies like Apple and Google, Ms. Bondi wrote that Mr. Trump had decided that shutting down TikTok would interfere with his “constitutional duties,” so the law banning the social media app must give way to his “core presidential national security and foreign affairs powers.”
The letters, which became public on Thursday via Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, portrayed Mr. Trump as having nullified the legal effects of a statute that Congress passed by large bipartisan majorities in 2024 and that the Supreme Court unanimously upheld.
Shortly after being sworn in, Mr. Trump issued an executive order directing the Justice Department to suspend enforcement of the TikTok ban and has since repeatedly extended it. That step has been overshadowed by numerous other moves he has made to push at the boundaries of executive power in the opening months of his second administration.
But some legal experts consider Mr. Trump’s action — and in particular his order’s claim, which Ms. Bondi endorsed in her letters, that he has the power to enable companies to lawfully violate the statute — to be his starkest power grab. It appears to set a significant new precedent about the potential reach of presidential authority, they said.
“There are other things that are more important than TikTok in today’s world, but for pure refusal to enforce the law as Article II requires, it’s just breathtaking,” said Alan Z. Rozenshtein, a University of Minnesota law professor who has written about the nonenforcement of the TikTok ban, referring to the part of the Constitution that says presidents must take care that the laws be faithfully executed.
The executive branch has the power, as a matter of prosecutorial discretion, to choose not to enforce laws in particular instances or to set priorities about what categories of lawbreaking they will prioritize when resources are limited.
Previous presidents have occasionally made aggressive use of that power, including when President Obama temporarily shielded from deportation undocumented immigrants who had been brought to the country as children. But the Obama administration also said such “deferred action” could be revoked and did not claim it made their presence lawful, nor cease to enforce immigration law against others.
In her letters, Ms. Bondi went far beyond that. Because of Mr. Trump’s order, she said, tech firms that acted contrary to the statute were breaking no law, even in theory, and the department was “irrevocably relinquishing” any legal claims against them — including under future administrations.
The companies, she wrote, “committed no violation of the act” and “incurred no liability under the act” during the periods that Mr. Trump had declared a suspension of the law. She also told them they may continue to provide services to TikTok “without violating the act, and without incurring any legal liability.”
Essentially, legal experts said, Mr. Trump is claiming a constitutional power to immunize private parties to commit otherwise illegal acts with impunity.
Zachary S. Price, a University of California San Francisco law professor who has written extensively about the limits of executive power to not enforce laws, compared Mr. Trump’s move with the Obama administration’s rules that delayed carrying out certain provisions of his health care law to ease the transition. But he portrayed the TikTok move as more extreme.
“This is a much bigger deal in that it is just nuking the whole statute instead of tweaking certain provisions,” Professor Price said. “It’s very damaging to the political process.”
Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and former senior Justice Department official in the Bush administration who has written about the TikTok issue, said Mr. Trump’s encroachment on the power of Congress established a precedent that far exceeded actions by other presidents that prompted partisan outcries.
“Recent past presidents have been aggressive in exercising law enforcement discretion, but they haven’t suspended the operation of a law entirely or immunized its violation prospectively,” Professor Goldsmith said.
He cited an 1838 Supreme Court case, involving a law about payments to government contractors, that says the Constitution does not give presidents the power to dispense with laws — a power that the British king used to have.
A spokesman for the Justice Department declined to comment. Representatives for Apple and Google’s parent company Alphabet did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Both companies make TikTok available to users of smartphones and other mobile devices in their app stores.
TikTok also relies on other companies to operate, including the providers of cloud computing services. Other companies that received Justice Department letters released on Thursday included Akamai, Amazon, Digital Realty Trust, Fastly, LG Electronics USA, Microsoft, Oracle and T-Mobile.
Last year, Congress enacted a law that banned the app in the United States unless its Chinese-owned parent company, ByteDance, sold it to a non-Chinese firm. Supporters of the law cited concerns that the Chinese government could amass sensitive user data about Americans or use the TikTok algorithm to manipulate public opinion.
The law says that companies that violate it can face civil fines up to $5,000 per user. A third of Americans say they have used TikTok, according to the Pew Research Center.
The Supreme Court unanimously upheld the law in January, and TikTok briefly disappeared from app stores for American users of Apple iPhones or smartphones using the Android operating system, which is run by Google.
But on Inauguration Day, Mr. Trump directed the Justice Department not to enforce the TikTok ban for 75 days to give his administration time to figure out what to do with it.
Mr. Trump also directed the attorney general to send letters to companies “stating that there has been no violation of the statute and that there is no liability for any conduct that occurred during the above-specified period, as well as for any conduct from the effective date of the act until the issuance of this executive order.”
He cited no authority for doing to, although he vaguely gestured toward his “unique constitutional responsibility for the national security of the United States, the conduct of foreign policy, and other vital executive functions.”
Neither the Trump administration nor the tech companies had made public the letters sent by Ms. Bondi. In May, The New York Times filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for the letters. A Silicon Valley software engineer, Tony Tan, also filed a FOIA lawsuit for them in California.
Mr. Tan, who received a more extensive set of Ms. Bondi’s letters on Thursday than the Justice Department provided to The Times, has also filed a lawsuit against Alphabetseeking board meeting notes and other corporate records related to its decision to restore TikTok to the Google app store.
In March, several Democratic lawmakers who opposed the TikTok ban told the White House that it was unacceptable for the executive branch to simply ignore the law and tried to enlist the administration’s support for legislation that would authorize a delay.
On June 29, Mr. Trump said in an interview that the government had found a buyer for TikTok but that it still needed to be approved by China’s leader, Xi Jinping. The White House had also said in April that it was close to a deal, but it apparently collapsed after his imposition of tariffs on China.
Professor Price warned of the constitutional implications carried by the letters, noting that presidents “don’t have the power to change the law itself.” He added, “That’s the line the TikTok order and these letters breach by purporting to legalize conduct that is unlawful by statute.”
Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy for The Times."