Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick bragged about giving tech billionaire Jensen Huang “really easy access” to President Donald Trump, setting in motion a contentious deal now at the heart of a national security sex scandal.
Lutnick used a Trumpy podcast to lift the lid on Trump’s close relationship with the disgraced former Nvidia boss and how easily Huang appeared to get his way in securing a deal to sell powerful AI chips to China.
Huang has been embraced by Trump.
Huang was forced to resign on Thursday over a series of extramarital affairs—including one with a suspected Chinese spy, raising alarm bells over whether America’s national security had been compromised.
But as Lutnick revealed in an astonishingly frank conversation on the All In podcast last year, the commerce secretary and the president had a strong relationship with the billionaire, and Lutnick even described him as a “national treasure,” promising prized access to the Oval Office to cut special deals.
Huang has since admitted to an extramarital affair.
“I promised him in the beginning when I first met him that I would help him have really easy access to the president,” Lutnick told the podcast, whose co-hosts include Trump’s then AI czar David Sacks, Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis and David Friedberg.
Huang then used his ties to the administration to argue that selling the chips to China would be a good thing because it would keep Chinese customers dependent on U.S. technology rather than driving them towards domestic competitors.
Trump agreed, Lutnick said, and then demanded a government cut in the form of a 25 percent tariff.
“The 25 percent was a throwaway. But it was like, ‘Look, if I’m doing all this for you, you still got to give me 25 percent,” Lutnick said as he explained the arrangement.
“He (Huang) has to send the chips to America. We test the chip to make sure that he hasn’t enhanced it in any way… On the way in, we can charge it a tariff, a regular 25 percent tariff, and then we can give export licenses to whoever he wants to sell it to. He sends it to China, or he sends it to whoever he’s selling it to.”
The agreement, which Lutnick described as “the president’s deal,” now forms part of a growing scandal that has engulfed the administration, with Lutnick and Huang facing calls to testify in Congress and the commerce secretary at risk of being axed.
It comes as Huang announced Thursday that he was stepping down as Nvidia CEO after admitting to an affair with Alice Huang (no relation), a suspected spy for Beijing and former executive at Singapore-based tech company Megaspeed.
Jensen Huang stands next to U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick in the Oval Office.
In his letter before stepping down, Huang admitted being unfaithful to his wife, Lori Huang, whom he married in 1985 and with whom he has two children, Madison and Spencer Huang.
Jensen Huang also had two more alleged affairs with Nvidia employees, one of whom was identified as Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of healthcare, who reported to him and who is also married.
But it’s his tryst with Alice Huang that has left Trump officials facing questions about what they knew and when they knew it.
Alice Huang and Jensen Huang in a picture posted on her WeChat account.
Lutnick’s own account is likely to add considerably to the scrutiny, as his department oversees the export-control system Nvidia was lobbying to loosen.
Lawmakers from both sides of politics are demanding answers, while Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent also threw Lutnick under the bus on Friday after confronting him in the Situation Room over his refusal to add Megaspeed to the Commerce Department’s entity list, which restricts access to American technology.
“There’ve been reports that there was some tension between you and Secretary Lutnick about why Megaspeed was not placed on the Entity List,” Bessent was asked on Friday morning on CNBC. “Could Treasury have done that? Was it only Lutnick that could’ve done that?”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent threw Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick under the bus amid the Nvidia fallout and escalating national security concerns.
“I can tell you there was coordination. It was Treasury, War, [the U.S. trade representative], and State. They were in favor of putting Megaspeed on the entity list for months. But Commerce has the pen,” Bessent replied. “You will have to ask [Lutnick] about their internal process.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House and the Commerce Department. Trump has so far stood by Huang this week, describing his resignation as “sad” while praising the former CEO and his company.
“He has a chip that’s so complex, so brilliant, that you can’t copy it,” Trump claimed on the Straight Shooter with Stephen A. podcast on Thursday.
“I mean, it’s beyond copying because of their level of genius. What he’s done is incredible; he built an incredible… Nvidia’s unbelievable.”
But he has not explained when he became aware of the national security concerns surrounding Huang or whether sensitive information about Nvidia’s advanced artificial intelligence chips could have been compromised.
US President Donald Trump stands with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, after presenting him with the National Medal of Science during the “A New Golden Age” summit at the US Institute of Peace, renamed The Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace by the Trump administration, in Washington, DC, US, October 8, 2026.
The pair have been close allies for months, with Nvidia committing $25 million to Trump’s White House ballroom, and Huang even traveling to China with the president in May for his summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
The scrutiny comes as fresh reporting suggests Lutnick was warned about the intelligence concerns surrounding Huang and Alice Huang months before the scandal became public.
According to Axios, Lutnick received a highly classified memo in May detailing the suspected Chinese intelligence operation and concerns surrounding Megaspeed.
“I mean, why were they selling the chips?” Republican Senator John Kennedy fumed on CNN. “Did they follow the trail? How do they know the chips went to the company and not to the Communist Party of China? I mean, this whole thing is an intergalactic freak show!”
Alice Huang.
Lutnick has reportedly agreed to testify voluntarily before the Senate Banking Committee, his spokesperson Kristen Eichamer told NBC.
Meanwhile, Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Chris Coons have demanded that Lutnick, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller preserve all communications and records concerning Nvidia’s China sales, the Megaspeed investigation, and the suspected intelligence operation.
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