Nvidia-Gate?
By
Leonard Zwelling
Peggy Noonan makes the case in her op-ed posted on The Wall Street Journal website on November 13, that the real story of Jensen Huang’s seemingly bottomless and ill-considered infidelities is not what his resignation has done to the price of Nvidia shares, but what a knowing White House and Commerce Department did not do to prevent the most powerful chips in the world from falling into the hands of China through subterfuge, sex, and espionage. If the executive branch will not protect the country from its adversaries when it has knowledge of an on-going threat, how can the leaders be expected to do anything right?
As far as I understand the details, our government was well aware of Mr. Huang consorting with a likely Chinese spy since the spring. Yet, even now, no one in the executive branch moved to stop this piercing of our national defenses.
It is pretty clear that Mr. Trump’s penchant for transactional deals with the big boys of Silicon Valley has now opened the United States to incursions into our lead in AI technology by our chief rival. It is time for Congress to say–enough!
Congressional committees on both ends of Capitol Hill need to convene hearings to get to the bottom of when the threat was first identified, who knew, who warned Mr. Huang, if anyone did, and why steps were not taken to eliminate the threat even if that meant telling Mr. Huang his relationship with the president was in jeopardy unless he dropped his affair for the good of his country rather than repeatedly dropping his pants for his own pleasure.
It is not uncommon for those in oversight roles to come upon someone whose comportment they regulate behaving badly. When this occurs, the responsible overseer needs to act to stop the bad behavior, especially if that behavior undermines the integrity of the organization. In this case, the United States was being threatened by secret agents from its greatest rival nation, the executive branch knew it, and did not move expeditiously to stop it. Mr. Huang is guilty, but so is Mr. Trump and Secretary of Commerce Lutnick both of whom nurtured close ties with Huang and the rest of the Silicon Valley CEO bros but would not stop Huang being a conduit for spying. Those relationships, that undoubtedly included the exchange of money from Nvidia deals into the pockets of Trump and Lutnick, blinded our national leadership and prevented that leadership from fulfilling its Constitutional obligation to the American people of providing “for the common defense.”
Was this a high crime and misdemeanor? Perhaps. Remember what constitutes grounds for impeachment is what Congress says those grounds are.
I’ve always been untrusting of men who cheat on their wives. I have never heard a viable excuse for it short of a wife in a coma. This also goes for women playing around on their husbands by the way, lest you think I view this as men only issue. It just seems to be men like Huang whose affairs hit the news more often and whose behavior generates such a steep fall.
Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the corruption in the White House and the rest of the Executive Branch has finally endangered the security of the American people and potentially undermined our lead in AI. Apparently, it was a poorly kept secret that Mr. Huang had a roving eye. It was just as obvious to me that despite his grand success, he set himself up for problems the moment he had 60 direct reports to himself, as I have read he had. He may have been a genius building and growing his company, but it all seems to have gone to his head and to other parts of his anatomy as well. The axiom is that blood flows poorly to these two separate sites simultaneously.
It takes a huge ego to have an affair with a direct report when leading the company where your children are executives and, in addition, having another of those affairs be with a Chinese spy.
I don’t really care who Jensen Huang sleeps around with—until it jeopardizes my country. This did and Trump and Lutnick look to have been complicit. Congress needs to get to the bottom of this and, if necessary, hold Trump or Lutnick responsible.
Who knows? Trump might have lost Florida too if this story broke before Election Day.
