Critics tear apart Trump for gutting spy unit just before explosive scandal

A humiliating scandal involving Nvidia CEO and White House inside man Jensen Huang made clear that President Donald Trump is vulnerable to the world of global espionage. Now critics are raging that Trump razed the Department of Justice divisions that once countered it.

“Just spit-balling here. But perhaps it was a bad idea to blow up the foreign agent and overseas bribery units of the Justice Department?” asked New York Times opinion writer Noah Shachtman on X.

Huang admitted to an affair with a former executive at Singapore-based Megaspeed whom U.S. intelligence reportedly suspects of spying for Beijing. Critics say Huang was a fool and should never be allowed near national security again. But the real issue, they say, is that the Trump administration tried to bury any inquiry into the threat that Huang’s affair poses.

The New York Times reported that Commerce Department agents investigating whether Megaspeed had smuggled Nvidia chips into China stopped their probe after Nvidia’s top lawyer reached out to them, and the Justice Department took over the case. But unspoken in many stories referencing the Huang affair -- and Trump’s connection to it -- make little mention of the fact that Trump also gutted departments that could have detected and neutralized an insider’s affair with a Chinese spy.

Former MAGA lawmaker and passionate Trump critic Joe Walsh immediately reposted Shachtman's comment, while other critics commenting beneath the post were quick to suspect that Trump — who is a convicted felon — may have destroyed various DOJ espionage wings for ulterior motives.

“When you realize how much Trump and his family have personally profited over the last two years, it becomes obvious why these units were blown up,” said one X commenter.

“Yes, but maybe it was exactly the right idea by and for the folks planning on interacting with foreign agents and committing overseas bribery,” quipped another.

Another heckler demanded if Shachtman really believed “that was just happenstance? Like getting rid of all the IGs, Trump understands the need to remove watchdogs.”

Back in February, critics attacked the administration’s "idiocy" for purging top lawyers from the Department of Justice.

“In 2025, I watched from inside the White House and at the CIA as the intelligence community came under assault: senior officers fired in public, clearances revoked for dissent, decade-old assessments denounced by the CIA director in the press,” Julia Curlee wrote for Lawfare. “Earlier this month, the campaign reached the raw intelligence itself, as the White House declassified selected reporting to sustain election interference claims that the intelligence community’s own finished analysis would not support.”

Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, however, slammed the administration for actually profiting from the sale of a “formerly restricted item to our to our existential adversary” China.

“Huang has been pushing for easing restrictions by the Trump administration on Nvidia selling chips to China, and he got them. He got them in return for the ability to sell Nvidia chips to China in return for giving the United States government 25 percent of that sale. That alone is off the charts,” said McCabe.