The bid by Japan's Nippon Steel to buy U.S. Steel may have a new lease on life after the Biden administration extended a deadline for the Japanese steelmaker to abandon plans to acquire the storied Pittsburgh company after President Joe Biden blocked the deal.

US Steel and Nippon, whose $14.3 billion merger was blocked by President Joe Biden last week, filed a lawsuit against the US government Monday, claiming Biden’s executive order to bar the companies from combining was signed for “purely political reasons.

The Biden administration has given U.S. Steel and Japan’s Nippon Steel an extra six months to ditch their merger, keeping the deal alive as litigation unfolds over whether a national security panel’s review of it was tainted by political considerations.

U.S. Steel and Japan’s Nippon Steel sued the United States government on Monday in a last-ditch attempt to revive their attempted merger after President Biden blocked it last week on the basis that the transaction posed a threat to national security.

The bid by Japan’s Nippon Steel to buy U.S. Steel may have a new lease on life, even as the potential for a new bid for the storied Pittsburgh steelmaker began to emerge Monday

President-elect Donald Trump has also expressed strong opposition to Japanese ownership of infrastructure giant.

By Kevin Buckland and Kiyoshi Takenaka TOKYO (Reuters) -Japan Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba asked U.S. President Joe Biden to allay concerns in the Japanese and U.S. business communities over the status of Nippon Steel's planned acquisition of U.

The proposed deal kicked up an election year political maelstrom across America’s industrial heartland and quickly drew vows by Biden and Trump from the campaign trail in a critical battleground state to block the deal.