WASHINGTON — Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who weathered questions about his time on slain pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s private island and his public advocacy of President Donald Trump’s disastrous “Liberation Day” tariffs, could become the first political casualty of a rapidly growing scandal surrounding an AI executive’s affair with an alleged Chinese spy.
White House officials are discussing whether to remove Lutnick from his post, Reuters reported Thursday. Lutnick was a key voice within the administration, arguing that Nvidia, the chipmaker formerly run by Jensen Huang, should be able to sell advanced chips to Megaspeed, a Singapore-based company run by a Chinese national with whom Huang had an affair.
While Trump has continued to defend Huang — even saying that an intelligence assessment that Huang was romantically involved with the Chinese agent “didn’t affect me much” — Republicans have so far focused their anger on the Commerce secretary.
Louisiana Republican Sen. John Kennedy wants answers — from Lutnick. “Secretary Lutnick must answer this question before God and country,” he told Politico.
Huang resigned Thursday morning under pressure from the company’s board of directors, as reports of two more affairs with subordinates came in.
Democrats have criticized Trump on the issue, and come January they will control committees in both houses and have subpoena power to compel administration officials to testify. Senators Chris Coons (D-Del.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who will chair the Senate Banking and Foreign Relations Committees in the next Congress, wrote a letter to Lutnick, National Security Advisor Marco Rubio and White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and asked them to preserve all documents on the matter and appear before Congress to explain “the risks this operation may have posed to our national security.”
But until then, Democrats must lean on Republicans, some of whom agree that Lutnick should explain himself. Almost all have remained silent about Trump’s much larger role.
Lucy Caldwell, a former Republican Party consultant who left the party after it was taken over by Trump, said the reluctance of other Republicans to directly attack Trump, even though his words and actions were the main reason why voters gave Democrats the largest mandate in two decades in last week’s midterm elections, was no longer surprising.
“There is always an exclusion for Trump to be responsible. And the formula is always that another Republican close to power becomes the shaker,” she said. “That’s how cults work.”
Two former Trump White House officials during his first term, now both critics, said focusing on Lutnick and other lesser officials was a good tactic.
“Eventually one of the subordinates will accuse Trump,” said John Bolton, a former national security adviser who, like many Trump critics, was prosecuted by the Trump Justice Department.
Ty Cobb, a former federal prosecutor who worked in Trump’s White House counsel’s office, agreed that Lutnick was a good place to start.
“It’s the perfect place to get married,” he said.
A central question in future investigations, Cobb said, is why Lutnick failed to put the company of Huang Le, the woman U.S. intelligence considers an agent of China, on a list of entities that could pose a threat to national security because of their ties to that country.
“Did he do it alone? Did he receive orders from Trump?” Cobb wondered.
The Trump White House did not respond to HuffPost’s questions. Neither does Lutnick’s Commerce Department.
During an interview Thursday with pro-Trump radio host Hugh Hewitt, Trump called the scandal a sad episode for Huang, who donated $25 million to Trump’s ballroom project while pressuring Trump to let Nvidia sell advanced chips to China.
“What a horrible thing this is! It’s so sad to see this happening,” he said.
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