Trump Administration to Receive $10 Billion Kickback for TikTok Deal ⇥ wsj.com

Miriam Gottfried and Amrith Ramkumar, Wall Street Journal:

The Trump administration is set to receive a roughly $10 billion fee from investors in the recently completed deal to take control of TikTok’s U.S. business, delivering it a windfall for keeping the popular social-media app alive in America.

The payment is part of the agreement through which investors friendly with the administration gained control of TikTok’s U.S. operations from Chinese parent ByteDance, people familiar with the matter said. It comes in addition to the investments made to create a new entity to run the app in the U.S.

Over five years ago, during the first Trump administration, he floated the possibility of getting “key money” for the U.S. Treasury, something he later bemoaned was apparently illegal. So much for that, where by that I mean respect for the law. This is a 70% commission rate to be given to — well, exactly where it will be booked seems like a mystery because it is not like there is a U.S. Department of Bribery.

Karl Bode, Techdirt:

Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal goes to comical lengths to normalize this bribe, though they do at least try to express how “unprecedented” this sort of thing is by citing an unnamed, ambiguous historian […]

“View from nowhere” journalism means these reporters from the Journal cannot call this naked corruption what it is, nor can they quote someone stating it. They can only gesture toward the obvious while writing the straightest of articles about the wackiest events. Things are going well.