On Friday, Fox Business – which typically extends the benefit of the doubt to allies of President Donald Trump – aired a segment that asked some blunt questions and made some blunt assertions about one White House official’s potential role in a “conspiracy” that has shocked the world over the past week. According to one frequent Fox contributor, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick “has a lot to answer for” if he was involved with schemes to smuggle banned microchips to China.
“Was there a conspiracy to flout the chip export laws?” wondered Fox Business host Stuart Varney. “Was Lutnick involved?” Varney was speaking with Gordon Chang, a conservative China researcher with Gatesone Institute, who joined Fox to discuss the raging scandal involving now-former Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who has experienced a shocking fall from grace following revelations that he’d engaged in an extramarital affair with an alleged Chinese spy. That spy was linked to a company that has been smuggling Nvidia’s advanced microchips to China, and it appears that Lutnick played a role in keeping dozens of similar companies off an export blacklist. As a result, there have been bipartisan calls for investigations, and it’s been reported that White House officials are considering whether Lutnick should be fired. Lutnick has agreed to testify before the Senate Banking Committee on December 10.
On Fox, Chang elaborated on the “conspiracy” allegations, saying there is “disturbing evidence” that Lutnick broke the law. “First of all, we know that Jeffrey Kessler, Under Secretary of Commerce, killed a Commerce Department investigation into Nvidia’s disturbing relationship with Megaspeed, the company of which Alice Huang, the suspected spy, was an executive,” Chang explained. “Also, we know that Commerce was issuing export permits for chip sales to companies that were obviously fronts. So I think that the Commerce Secretary has a lot to answer for when he goes to Congress, because people should be asking him about that: why would they kill that investigation?”
Varney wanted to know whether Trump or Lutnick had any “financial interest” in selling the microchips to China. “I suspect something,” asserted Chang. “That needs to be proved. I think the FBI has to look at this. People have been saying some pretty awful things about Lutnick.” In Chang’s estimation, regardless of any financial incentives, Lutnick’s actions in the Commerce Department are troubling enough in their own right that the accumulating revelations “are going to lead to something much greater.”
Questions loom not only about how the banned microchips were allowed to be exported, but about Huang’s close relationship with Trump over the past two years. Huang has been one of several tech moguls who have forged close ties with the administration, even joining Trump for a summit in China last year -- after the president had already learned of Huang’s relationship with a potential spy. “It does create questions,” former NSA analyst Ira Winkler told Fox earlier this week. “It's not just one time, hey, I'm blackmailing you[.] They had long-term access and clear cooperation in many cases.” That cooperation not only resulted in Jensen Huang helping Chinese companies avoid export restrictions, but may have allowed the spy to gather information “regarding Donald Trump's mindset.” Huang, Winkler noted, “did have regular access to Donald Trump.”