Steve Bannon, the one-time adviser to Donald Trump, suggested on Saturday that the former president was paid off after a shift in stance on TikTok.
Despite his past stances in favor of action against TikTok for its Chinese ties, Trump, the leading candidate for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, wrote in a Truth Social post on Thursday that he opposed the recent bill, citing his oft-repeated false claims about widespread voter fraud during the 2020 presidential election.
In response to this post, reports noted that the seeming shift in stance from Trump came after a meeting with Jeff Yass, a conservative hedge fund manager who has a $33 billion stake in TikTok. Yass, according to Intelligencer, has been allegedly threatening to pull support from GOP lawmakers who back the bipartisan divestment bill.
Bannon, who led Trump’s successful 2016 presidential campaign and served as a White House adviser for the first several months of Trump’s presidency, took to Gettr to make his suspicions about the situation clear.
“Simple: Yass Coin,” he wrote in a post that included a link to an Axios story about Trump’s flip on TikTok.
In August 2020, Trump issued an executive order ordering ByteDance to sell its U.S. assets and destroy all data within 90 days.
“There is credible evidence that leads me to believe that ByteDance Ltd…. through acquiring all interests in musical.ly…might take action that threatens to impair the national security of the United States,” the order read.
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