Actually things aren’t that bad. Maybe. Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland is going to challenge Chuck Schumer for the Senate Majority Leader position, and I wish him well. I’d write to my senators endorsing him, but my senators are Chuck Schumer and the mostly useless Kirsten Gillibrand. Oh well.
And for a reason why we need sharper Democrats in the Senate, see The Democrats’ First Move After Their Big Win? A Giveaway to Big Oil. by Aaron Regunberg in The New Republic.
The Nvidia scandal keeps growing. Yesterday Jensen Huang resigned as Nvidia’s president and CEO. And then Todd Blanche trotted out and declared that U.S. intelligence really didn’t know for sure whether the alleged spy Huang was intimate with was actually a spy. Really? I wondered if that was an attempt to make excuses for Trump’s ignoring all the warnings about Huang and the spy.
Now it looks like Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is being set up to take the fall for whatever the administration might have done wrong. Lutnick has been fighting off the many calls for tighter regulation of the sale of Nvidia’s precious AI chips to Asia. And we’re to believe that Trump had nothing to do with that. Note that Trump owns at least $12.5 million worth of Nvidia Corp. stock, according to his financial disclosures. Although it may not be worth that much now. (For the record, Lutnick divested from his stocks when he took the SecCommerce job.)
Yeaterday top Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee announced an investigation into the “Trump Administration’s Scheme to Take Cut of Nvidia AI Chip Sales to Chinese Companies.”
Under the scheme, Nvidia chips manufactured in Taiwan could be sold to Chinese companies if they were first imported into the United States for a security review, which would require payment of a 25% tariff under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, a trade law designed to address imports that threaten national security. Then the Commerce Department would grant Nvidia an export license to sell the chips to Chinese companies.
According to reports, the Commerce Department suspended its investigation into suspected smuggling into China of certain Nvidia chips following outreach from the company. Nvidia and Huang donated at least $26 million to Trump’s pet projects.
Lutnick and Huang have agreed to appear before Congress.
This thing has the potential of being Watergate on steroids. See also The Jensen Huang Scandal Should Change Everything by Thomas Wright and A $5.7 Trillion Face-Plant by Matteo Wong, both at The Atlantic.
And see Trump Says He’s Pulling Vance Off Iran Talks to Focus on Fraud Campaign by Luke Broadwater at the New York Times. Trump is saying that we no longer need a deal with Iran, which leaves a whole lot of people wondering what he’s going to do next.
This might get interesting:
OK, now the craziest, terrible story that you’ll never read in the US media. I’m sure you political junkies all remember Brad Parscale and, of course, Dick Morris. Parscale was Trump’s 2020 campaign manager. Dick Morris was, well, Dick Morris. Since Parscale was booted out of Trump’s campaign, he’s been consulting on campaigns in Latin America. One of his colleagues is Fernando Cerimedo, considered “MAGA’s Man in South America” and has consulted with right-wing leaders there, most recently in Bolivia. It was in Bolivia where Cerimedo (allegedly) contracted killers to murder his partner, Nadia Beller, who was pregnant with (allegedly) his child. Beller survived the attack where she received three gunshot wounds. Now, she’s spilling tea about the whole network of right-wing influence in Latin America, including this photo:
https://heymistermix.com/p/checking-in-with-los-mexicanas-y-mexicanos