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Trump team mulls removing Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick amid NVIDIA probe

newsNov 12, 2026444,951

Senior White House officials are debating whether to remove Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang resigned following revelations of an affair with Alice Huang, a Singapore-based Megaspeed executive whom U.S. agencies suspect of espionage, two sources told Reuters. Lawmakers have intensified scrutiny of Lutnick for the Trump administration's reluctance to place dozens of Chinese firms on a U.S. trade blacklist and for what critics call a failure to curb Nvidia AI chip transfers to China. Reuters reported the administration declined in June to add Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, memory maker CXMT, and more than 100 other firms flagged as national security risks; no additions have been made to that blacklist since October 2025. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Chris Coons demanded that Lutnick, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and White House chief of staff Stephen Miller preserve documents related to Nvidia’s exports after noting Megaspeed purchased about $4.8 billion of Nvidia AI chips since June 2024. Senate Finance chair Ron Wyden and Rep. Richard Neal separately pressed Lutnick over approvals that allowed Nvidia to ship advanced H200 processors to China, and they described the Commerce actions that collected export revenues as an "unconstitutional export tax." A separate report described a Situation Room confrontation between Scott Bessent and Lutnick over a suspected chip diversion, and top House Democrats are calling for an investigation, raising the prospect of hearings, subpoenas, and possible removal or further White House action.

3 sources