The Scoop
Sen. Ron Wyden, the chair of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, sharply criticized former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, and his ties to money from the Middle East, in his effort to buy TikTok from its Chinese owner.
Mnuchin told CNBC last week that he’s assembling a group of investors to buy the platform after the House overwhelmingly passed a bill forcing it to either be sold within six months or banned from app stores. The White House has urged the Senate, where the bill has powerful backers and opponents in both parties, to move quickly.
Mnuchin gave few details on who might be part of his bidding group except to say he was working with a “combination of U.S. investors.” But much of the $2.5 billion investment fund he raised after leaving office came from governments in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, where Mnuchin was a frequent visitor during his time in government.
“I don’t see how America will be any more secure if the next owner of TikTok is a MAGA Trump crony backed by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund,” Wyden told Semafor.
“I’m absolutely concerned about the Chinese government’s access to Americans’ personal data,” he said. “But every concern that has been voiced about Chinese influence is equally valid when it comes to a Saudi government that murdered a Washington Post journalist after planting spyware on his wife’s phone.”
The New York Times reported that Saudi Arabia had committed $1 billion to Mnuchin’s Liberty Strategic Capital fund, and that the governments of Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates were in for $500 million each. (Mnuchin has acknowledged that his investors include foreign governments, as well as wealthy families and insurance companies.)
In a 2022 letter to Mnuchin’s successor, Janet Yellen, Wyden suggested that Mnuchin may have used a swing through the Gulf in the final days of the Trump administration to fundraise on the taxpayer’s dime. He filed paperwork for his investment firm the day after he left office.
A Liberty spokesperson said: “As Secretary Mnuchin said on CNBC last week, TikTok should be controlled by U.S. investors and no single investor should own more than 10%.”
* This story has been updated to include a comment from Liberty.
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There’s no guarantee that the Senate will pass the bill or, if it does, what a sales process might actually look like. Chinese officials have publicly criticized the effort and privately told ByteDance, which owns TikTok, that it would rather see the app banned in the U.S. than sold — a sign that its value to Beijing has more to do with politics than with profits.
Blue-chip U.S. companies including Microsoft, Oracle, and Walmart were interested back in 2020, when then-President Donald Trump tried to force a sale of TikTok. But Mnuchin’s recent rescue of a troubled New York bank, for which he put together $1 billion in a matter of days, has quickly burnished his image as a credible buyer in sticky situations. And his status as a former federal official may give him the inside track.
So, too, would the perception that he has Trump’s ear. Any seasoned watcher of either corporate dealmaking or geopolitics knows that a sale this complicated is unlikely to happen in as short as six months, which could push it close to or past November’s presidential election.