Fresh questions emerged Thursday about the Trump administration’s handling of a growing Chinese espionage scandal after Attorney General Todd Blanche appeared to downplay concerns surrounding a suspected spy at the center of the controversy.
CNN’s Boris Sanchez and Brianna Keilar questioned Blanche’s remarks after he insisted the Justice Department had reached no conclusions about Alice Huang, a former executive at Nvidia customer Megaspeed who had been suspected by U.S. intelligence officials of working for China.
“There’s no conclusions reached by the Department of Justice or by me or by Director Patel about who she is or is not,” Blanche told reporters.
The attorney general also dismissed concerns that the Commerce Department may have obstructed efforts to investigate Megaspeed, which has faced scrutiny over allegations involving restricted American computer chips reaching China.
“I don’t have concerns with the Commerce Department,” Blanche insisted. “We have a good relationship with the Commerce Department.”
His response immediately caught the attention of CNN’s anchors.
“He took issue, it sounded like, with the premise of the question that DOJ knew that she was a spy, which raises a lot of questions,” Keilar observed.
“Well, what does DOJ know here? How long have they been looking into this? Maybe only relatively recently,” she added.
The exchange came amid reports that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had overseen a classified intelligence memo warning senior administration officials about Huang’s relationship with former Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
“So it’s interesting to hear the attorney general of the United States say that he’s not aware that Alice Huang was actually a spy,” Sanchez said.
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