WASHINGTON (US) – The Justice Department asked a federal judge in San Francisco on Friday to permit the Trump administration to ban Apple Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google from enabling WeChat download in US app stores pending an appeal.
The department asked Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler to withhold her injunction issued on Saturday. It blocked the Commerce Department order that was supposed to come into effect on Sept. 20.
The filing of the Justice Department said that the judge’s order was in error and “permits the continued, unfettered use of WeChat, a mobile application that the Executive Branch has determined constitutes a threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”
Meanwhile, Tencent had come forward with a proposal to create an American version of the application with safety measures to protect the source code and tie up with a US cloud provider and manage the application through a US-based entity, said the Justice Department in the filing.