Mike Waltz, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for national security advisor, praised TikTok as a “fantastic app” Sunday on CNN after his boss vowed to “save” it from being banned in the US.

Waltz notably referred to the platform as “spyware” last year during an interview with Fox Business Network anchor Stuart Varney. During that interview, Waltz said banning TikTok was not going “far enough.”

On CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, network anchor Dana Bash asked the Florida Republican to weigh in on his boss’s change of tune on TikTok – including offering the app a 90-day extension after its Chinese owners declined to divest from the app to comply with federal law.

Bash noted both Trump and Waltz had previously portrayed TikTok as a threat to national security before she asked, “So how do you keep them even for 90 days as a China hawk?”

Waltz said he still had concerns but he viewed TikTok as “fantastic”:

I don’t want the FBI looking at my passports. I don’t want the Chinese Communist Party looking at my passwords. Excuse me, or what’s going on in my data or certainly not influencing 170 million Americans. But it is a fantastic app. It’s something that 170 million Americans enjoy. And we’re confident that we can save TikTok, but also protect Americans’ data and protect them from influence. Whether that’s an outright sale, whether that’s some mechanism of firewalls to make sure that the data is protected here on US soil. That’s what the president will be evaluating.

Bask asked Waltz how Trump’s move to “save” TikTok is not “capitulating to China.”

Waltz said TikTok can exist in America and be safe if its owner ByteDance comes to the table. He said seeking such a solution is “not capitulating at all.”

The former Florida congressman’s Sunday statements are starkly different in their tone from the ones he made last year during his interview with Varney.

He told the Fox host:

Look, you know, we have to ask ourselves, why is it okay to ban TikTok on all government devices? Because it’s essentially a spyware tool that now the Canadian government, the Indian government, the U.K. government is considering [banning]. But it’s okay to have it on our kids phones, monitoring everything. They look at their passwords, their keystrokes. And by the way, for 100 million Americans, the Chinese can then also know where all of our port operators are, our pilots, our train engineers. We wouldn’t have never allowed this in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. And we shouldn’t be allowing it now.

Watch the clips above via CNN and Fox Business Network.

The post Trump’s Nat-Sec Pick Mike Waltz – Who Called TikTok ‘Spyware’ Last Year on Fox – Praises App as ‘Fantastic’ on CNN After Trump Vows to ‘Save’ It first appeared on Mediaite.

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