BREAKING: Knives are out in Trump’s Cabinet. Scott Bessent just publicly blamed Howard Lutnick for letting a company at the center of the Nvidia spy scandal keep getting chips
Trump’s top economic advisers are now fighting in public over who let the chips flow.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went on CNBC Friday and pointed the finger straight at Lutnick’s Commerce Department. He said Treasury, the Pentagon and the State Department had wanted restrictions on Megaspeed, the Nvidia customer at the heart of the Jensen Huang spy-sex scandal, for months. But “Commerce has the pen,” and it never put the company on the export control list. Asked why, Bessent told viewers to ask Commerce about its “internal processes.”
It was the first time Bessent has attacked Lutnick’s agency in public, and it didn’t come out of nowhere. A former Trump administration official told the Washington Post that Bessent confronted Lutnick over it last Thursday. The same official said Trump himself had ordered Lutnick three times to restrict exports of Nvidia’s most powerful chips, most recently last week. Lutnick reportedly resisted, warning it would spark a trade war with China.
Huang resigned Thursday after reports of two affairs, one with a Megaspeed employee suspected of being a Chinese spy.
Now Republicans are circling too. Sen. Tim Scott wants Lutnick to testify next month alongside Huang. Sen. John Kennedy said he wants to know whether Lutnick knew where $4 billion in chips went “after you gave them to the Chinese spy.” And conservative broadcaster Erick Erickson said the GOP should drain the swamp by “pulling the plug on Howard Lutnick.”
Democrats are demanding Commerce preserve its records. Sens. Wyden and Neal flagged a “profound lack of due diligence” in how Commerce approved Chinese buyers, including cutout companies with no physical presence at their listed addresses.
Remember, this is the same administration that scrapped Biden’s chip export rules soon after taking office.
The party that promised to drain the swamp is now fighting over who let the spy in.