Updated at 3:22 p.m. ET

TikTok has filed a federal lawsuit against the Trump administration arguing that the president’s executive order taking aim at the Chinese-owned app is unconstitutional and should be blocked from taking effect.

The suit, which has been expected for weeks, claims that President Trump’s Aug. 6 executive action declaring a national emergency that would effectively ban the video-sharing app in the U.S. was taken without any opportunity for the company to be heard, allegedly violating its due-process rights.

TikTok’s attorneys additionally claim the president exceeded his authority in issuing the order and that the planned ban violates the company’s free speech rights, arguing that computer code is a type of expression protected under the First Amendment.

The Trump administration has long maintained that TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance, could share Americans’ personal data with China’s authoritarian government, something the White House considers a national security threat.

But in its lawsuit, TikTok said it has taken “extraordinary measures” to protect the privacy of more than 100 million U.S. citizens who use TikTok by storing their data outside China in Virginia, with backup in Singapore, as well as building “software barriers” to ensure data that TikTok harvests stays separate from ByteDance.

“The executive order seeks to ban TikTok purportedly because of the speculative possibility that the application could be manipulated by the Chinese government,” TikTok’s lawsuit says.

Attorneys for the company say Trump’s crackdown on TikTok is not driven by genuine national security concerns but rather an attempt “to further the president’s anti-China political campaign.”

Trump’s executive order would make it a crime for U.S. citizens to have any business transactions with TikTok. The order would likely force Apple and Google to remove the service from app stores and deprive users who already have the app of critical updates.

Violators could face fines up to $300,000, or even criminal charges, according to the emergency economic powers Trump cited in his executive order. Typically, such sanctions have been leveled against foreign terrorist organizations and kleptocrats, not technology companies.

Exercising his authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the president did not follow due process and did not act in good faith by not providing any evidence that TikTok is an actual threat, nor did the administration justify punishing the app, attorneys for TikTok argue.

“The executive order is not rooted in bona fide national security concerns. Independent national security and information security experts have criticized the political nature of this executive order, and expressed doubt as to whether its stated national security objective is genuine,” TikTok’s attorneys wrote.

TikTok gathers data on users comparable to other apps controlled by major U.S. technology companies, but it states in its privacy guidelines that it can share information with its Chinese owners, which has caused alarms in Washington.

In the suit, TikTok points out that national security experts have openly questioned whether its lighthearted videos can really provide much intelligence to Beijing authorities.

“The vast majority of TikTok videos could not reasonably be construed to in any way relate to national security, nor is its user data more susceptible to collection by Chinese authorities than from any number of other sources,” the lawsuit says.

Separately, Trump has ordered ByteDance to sell its U.S. assets to an American company, an additional pressure intended to speed up an acquisition of TikTok by a U.S. firm.

In 2017, ByteDance acquired China-based lip-syncing app Musical.ly, which had accrued a sizable American following that helped fuel the rise of TikTok in the United States. As part of that takeover, regulators in Washington reviewed “voluminous documentation” about the company’s security practices, a process that ultimately secured the blessing of American authorities.

In its suit, TikTok’s legal team says the Trump administration ignored the findings of that review.

“Among other evidence, ByteDance submitted detailed documentation to CFIUS demonstrating TikTok’s security measures to help ensure U.S. user data is safeguarded in storage and in transit and cannot be accessed by unauthorized persons — including any government — outside the United States,” according to the lawsuit. (CFIUS, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, is a group led by the Treasury Department and includes top officials such as those from the Justice and Homeland Security departments.)

TikTok, known for short, often goofy videos, has been downloaded more than 2 billion times worldwide, recording in the first quarter of 2020 the most downloads of any app in history, according to research firm Sensor Tower.

About 1,500 people in the U.S. work for TikTok, with its U.S. headquarters in Los Angeles. The company says it has plans of hiring an additional 10,000 American workers over the next three years.

Facebook recently launched a service remarkably similar to TikTok called Reels following Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg long publicly warning about how an ascendant China poses a direct threat to American technology, a theme he underscored during his remarks last month to Congress.

TikTok CEO Kevin Mayer called Facebook’s Reels a “copycat service” that is “disguised as patriotism and designed to put an end to our very presence in the U.S.”

The White House did not immediately comment on TikTok’s lawsuit.

Editor’s note: TikTok helps fund NPR-produced videos from Planet Money that appear on the social media platform.

Updated at 12:02 p.m. ET

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy defended his management of the U.S. Postal Service to the House on Monday amid concerns that his cost-cutting measures have jeopardized the agency’s ability to serve Americans.

The hearing of the House Oversight Committee is underway now. Watch the hearing live.

Mail service has slowed across the country, according to internal documents obtained by the Oversight Committee, but DeJoy denies that is part of any attempt to reduce throughput to complicate voting by mail this year.

In fact, he said in his prepared opening statement, DeJoy expects the Postal Service to be able to accommodate all the mailed ballots that Americans send this year.

The postmaster general encouraged voters to request ballots early and return them early but said he is confident that the Postal Service can handle any surge in traffic, which would amount to less than one day’s worth of volume.

DeJoy also said as much on Friday when he testified before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

Those were his first public remarks since agreeing to postpone a number of controversial changes to the way the agency would run, such as reducing employee overtime hours and eliminating hundreds of postal-sorting machines.

DeJoy acknowledged the problems caused by the initiatives but said he expects the Postal Service to work out the kinks and get through the backlogs and dips in service it has experienced.

“Transitions don’t always go smoothly; you need a recovery process … our recovery process should have been resolved in a few days. There are a lot of things that are impacting our service … we should have cleared it up quicker. We have to focus on it now and we’ll recover quite rapidly.”

Political flap

The internal changes to the Postal Service have proved contentious to lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. Democrats accused DeJoy, an ally of President Trump and a Republican megadonor, of scheming to kneecap mail-in voting, which is expected to surge this year as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

DeJoy calls those allegations outrageous.

More broadly, Democrats charged that DeJoy has damaged a legendary and widely popular institution in American life. Critics repeated anecdotes about medicines not being delivered or trucks departing for deliveries empty or without their normal loads of mail.

DeJoy says he imposed a new schedule for truck deliveries that he hopes will result in efficiencies; Democrats say he betrayed his office.

“You have ended a once-proud tradition,” said Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass.

Oversight Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., also complained about what she called a lack of responsiveness from the Postal Service following questions about DeJoy’s changes and their effect on the mail.

Some Republicans have also criticized the changes, which they say hurt constituents in rural parts of the country who rely on the Postal Service. Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., said she and her husband have personally “endured some very poor performance on the part of the Postal Service.”

GOP claims “political stunt”

But Republicans’ political position on Monday was to scoff at the notion that DeJoy is some kind of factotum for Trump who is hurting mail service in support of Trump’s years-long and unfounded claims about fraud in elections.

“This is a political stunt,” said ranking member Rep. James Comer, R-Ky. “I am disappointed by the hysterical frenzy whipped up by our colleagues and their friends in the media.”

He and other Republicans pointed to legislation passed on Saturday in the House to infuse $25 billion into the Postal Service.

The bill also would block the Postal Service from making any service or operations changes through at least January and would require the agency to prioritize delivery of all election-related mail.

Though 26 House Republicans sided with Democrats to approve the legislation, the White House has threatened a veto, and the bill is not expected to advance through the Republican-controlled Senate.

Moreover, as Comer observed, action on the bill took place before the hearing convened on Monday — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and the majority had acted ahead of their own ostensible fact-finding process for the sake of headlines, he said, as opposed to truly wishing to govern.

“Meaningful reform is going to take bipartisanship — something we have seen precious little of in the past few days,” Comer said.

The chairwoman rejected the idea that now is the time for a wholesale restructuring of the Postal Service. That can only come after the ongoing emergency, she argued.

“After the pandemic we can revisit and have other statements and work can go forward — but let’s not dismantle these services to the American people; veterans and seniors deserve to get their mail in a timely way,” Maloney said.

Trump, meanwhile, has complained about Democrats’ proposals to boost funding for the the Postal Service to support additional mail-in voting, claiming, without evidence, that mail-in voting is more susceptible to fraud.

Trump himself cast a mail ballot in Florida last week.