This weekend, Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) joined the Fox News Rundown to discuss House passage of H.R. 7521, the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.

The bill, which passed with overwhelming bipartisan support, will protect Americans by preventing foreign adversaries, such as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), from targeting, surveilling, and manipulating the American people through applications, like TikTok.

Highlights and excerpts from the interview:

• “The choice is TikTok’s. They can either choose to continue to operate under the control of the Chinese Communist Party, because they are owned by ByteDance, or they can choose to divest from ByteDance and the Chinese Communist Party and continue to operate in the United States of America and businesses and individual users can continue to use the app the way that they always have.”
• “This bill only applies to applications that are subject to the control of specific adversaries that are listed in the bill. We list these foreign adversaries as China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.”
• “TikTok has repeatedly been caught in this lie that it doesn’t answer to the Chinese Communist Party through ByteDance. We know that TikTok has been used to spy on American journalists. We know that TikTok has been used to surveil American user data.”
• “[China] has the potential to manipulate people for their own gain.”
• “Even internal TikTok employee recordings have revealed ‘everything is seen in China.’ We know that we cannot trust China to safeguard our data.”
• “We have grave concerns about TikTok being owned by a foreign adversary and having this access and what that means to our national security. We’ve been briefed by our national intelligence agencies, and they have impressed upon us that this is a very real threat.”
• “Immediately after the bill passed, the [leaders] of the [Senate] Intelligence Committee, Sen. Mark Warner and Sen. Marco Rubio issued a statement in support [of the bill]. There’s other Senators that are voicing support for the bill and for us taking action.”