It’s looking like Trump’s first term again as knives come out at the White House over Nvidia scandal

Resumen detallado

The backbiting and leaking that characterized Trump’s first term is back in full force - and this time Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick appears to be the target, White House Correspondent Andrew Feinberg writes

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It’s beginning to look a lot like 2017, thanks to ex-Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

The Nvidia co-founder’s career has spontaneously combusted since he admitted last week to an extramarital affair with Alice Huang, a Chinese businesswoman who U.S. officials suspect of being an asset or agent of China’s Ministry of State Security, its equivalent of the CIA.

A trio of House committee chairs have demanded Huang appear before Congress to brief them on his ties to Ms. Huang (no relation).

On Monday, The New York Times revealed that he’d also had a second affair with one of his subordinates, leading Nvidia’s board to move towards tossing him out of the company he’d started three decades earlier.

The tech billionaire’s problems have brought about a temporal vibe shift — reviving and exposing Trump administration infighting and leaking at a level not seen since the heady early months of the president’s chaotic first White House term.

To start, the Times scooped that Marco Rubio, Secretary of State cum National Security Adviser, was so sufficiently alarmed at what U.S. intelligence officials were learning about Alice Huang through electronic surveillance that he drafted a classified memorandum detailing how she’d allegedly been recruited by the Chinese spy agency.

The goal of the Chinese operation was reportedly to send Alice Huang to target Jensen Huang in hopes of learning more about his products and influencing him to push Nvidia towards selling Beijing more of the company’s cutting-edge AI chips, according to reports.

Rubio was so concerned by what he read about the Nvidia CEO’s relationship with Alice Huang that he made a point of briefing President Donald Trump on the memorandum while aboard Air Force One en route to China this past May.

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