A federal judge in San Francisco said on Thursday that a former executive at ByteDance lied in statements to the court and seemed to have fabricated an important witness in a high-profile case against the company.
Yintao Yu, the head of engineering for ByteDance’s U.S. operations from August 2017 to November 2018, filed a wrongful dismissal suit against the company in May 2023. In the filing, Mr. Yu claimed that ByteDance’s Beijing offices had a special unit of Chinese Communist Party members, sometimes referred to as the Committee, which monitored the company’s apps and “guided how the company advanced core Communist values.” ByteDance is the Chinese company that owns TikTok.
The claims caught widespread attention as American lawmakers debated whether TikTok was a national security threat under Chinese ownership.
But Susan Illston, the federal judge overseeing the case in the U. S. District Court in Northern California, said that Mr. Yu “engaged in serious, bad faith conduct that has abused the judicial process.” Mr. Yu’s case relied in part on a declaration from an anonymous ByteDance employee about certain employment records, and the judge said that Mr. Yu seemed to have “fabricated the anonymous declaration.”
According to the judge, Mr. Yu also perjured himself in documents related to that anonymous employee, and in other filings with the court, as well. His “obstructive and mendacious conduct has caused delay, required additional motion practice, and vexatiously multiplied these proceedings,” the judge wrote in a filing.
Ms. Illston’s order will require Mr. Yu to return to private arbitration to mediate his dispute with ByteDance.
ByteDance said last year that Mr. Yu’s claims and allegations were “baseless.”
On Friday, a spokesman for TikTok declined to comment beyond what was said in the filings. A lawyer for Mr. Yu declined to comment.
The legal win for ByteDance and TikTok comes at a precarious time for the company. Under a new law, ByteDance must sell TikTok or face a ban in the United States as of Jan. 19.
A House committee sent letters to the chief executives of Apple and Google on Friday, warning them to comply with the law in the absence of the divestment of TikTok by ByteDance. The law requires app store operators like Apple and Google to stop distributing and updating the TikTok app. Apple did not respond to a request for comment on its plans to comply with the law. Google declined to comment.
The committee urged TikTok’s chief executive to pursue a sale in a separate letter. TikTok has asked a federal court to temporarily freeze the law, in the hope of a rescue by the Supreme Court or the incoming Trump administration.
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