DOJ Says Maybe She Wasn’t a Spy as It Tries to Clean Up Nvidia Mess

U.S. intelligence officials reportedly concluded Alice Huang—the woman whom Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had an affair with—is a Chinese government spy one year ago. But now, when pressed for further answers, the Justice Department is suggesting that she might not have been a spy at all.

“When did the Justice Department learn, with regard to Nvidia, that Alice Huang might be a suspected Chinese asset?” a reporter asked Attorney General Todd Blanche at a Thursday press conference. “There’s been concerns raised that the Commerce Department was giving favoritism to Nvidia and Megaspeed, which was Alice Huang’s company. Do you share the concerns that maybe the Commerce Department was impeding the ability to uncover the smuggling network that Alice Huang was involved in?”

“Well, your first question assumes something that I have never said, and that I don’t know to be true,” Blanche replied. “So you assume that DOJ learns that she is in fact a spy—I have not, nobody said that, I certainly haven’t said that. All I said … is that of course DOJ’s investigators are looking at it. There’s no conclusions reached … around who she is or is not.”

This raises further questions about the Trump administration’s handling of the scandal. According to The New York Times, President Trump reportedly knew about the intelligence reports on Huang’s affair—and the fact that she was an alleged honeypot—for months. U.S. intelligence had had Alice Huang under surveillance for more than a year, and State Secretary Marco Rubio personally informed Trump about it again after the president invited Huang to join him on his trip to Beijing. The two traveled together to China anyway. Meanwhile, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has reportedly spent the last year trying to avoid targeting Megaspeed.

Nvidia is the most powerful artificial intelligence company in the world, with 90 percent of the market share of the chips that power the vast majority of AI. The Trump administration knew that U.S. intelligence was reporting that Jensen Huang was likely compromised by the Chinese government. But Blanche’s answers suggest that the Trump administration is moving to protect Huang, who is a good friend of Trump—even as he resigned from his post at Nvidia on Thursday as his third cheating scandal was exposed.

Republican Representative Tom Emmer, who was just reelected to lead House Republicans as the party’s whip, a member of the GOP leadership in the House, appears to be doubling down on bigotry and racism following his party’s massive midterm defeat.

On Thursday, Emmer, who represents Minnesota’s 6th congressional district, called on the U.S. military to remove his fellow Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar, who is of Somali origin, saying that she should be removed from Congress after ranting about all the Somalis in his state. Emmer was speaking to conservative podcaster Benny Johnson, who asked him if Omar was an American citizen.

“I don’t think she should be. I think it’s gonna be proven that her birthdate—she has lied about it repeatedly. I think that’s documented,” Emmer said.

Emmer added that “once it is confirmed that she was not under the age of 18 when her father was naturalized, regardless of whether he was rightly naturalized or not, she was over the age of 18. Guess what, Benny? That is an administrative process. She is immediately no longer a citizen, and she has to reapply for citizenship. And by the way, I’ll just remind you that at that point, she’s no longer a member of Congress anymore, either.”

Emmer called Omar “one of the dumbest people you could be” and “completely anti-American.” When Johnson asked him if the military or Capitol Police should remove Omar from Congress if she’s determined not to be a legal citizen, Emmer replied, “Yes! The sergeant at arms, she is no longer allowed on the House floor.”

The rest of Emmer’s interview with Johnson contained more slurs against Somali Americans, as he made up stories and echoed President Trump’s accusations of fraud. When Johnson called Somalis a “scar” on the face of Minnesota, Emmer readily agreed.

Now the second-highest ranking Republican in the House, Emmer isn’t changing his ways, just like the rest of his party. In the past, he wasn’t so outwardly racist, even co-founding the Somali American Caucus in 2015 with Democratic Representative Keith Ellison, who is now Minnesota’s attorney general.

In 2016, Emmer defended Somalis in a town hall with his constituents, calling them “some of the fastest-assimilating populations that we’ve had.”

“If you’re asking me how I feel about immigrant populations who are in this country legally, and who are actually trying to find a better way for themselves and their families, I support it wholeheartedly,” Emmer said a decade ago. “I mean, the Germans had the same problem when they came over. The Polish had the problem. The Chinese had the problem.”

How times have changed.

Donald Trump would like to “get Cuba done” before his second term is out.

The president positively responded to a question about potential U.S. military intervention in Cuba during an interview with Salem News Channel on Thursday.

“If freeing Cuba requires military force before you leave office, will you order that military force?” asked host Hugh Hewitt.

“I want to get Cuba done before I leave, yeah, and we have a very good, talented guy for Cuba named Marco,” Trump said, referring to State Secretary Marco Rubio, whose family hails from the Caribbean island nation.

“He would love to do that,” Trump added, before referring to Cuba as a “failed place.”

It’s far from the first time that the administration has made a target out of America’s Communist neighbor.

Trump told reporters at the White House in March—while Cuba was struggling with an unprecedented economic crisis made worse by America’s Venezuelan oil blockade—that he expected to have the “honor” of “taking Cuba in some form.”

“I do believe I’ll be ... having the honor ​of taking Cuba. That’s a big honor. Taking Cuba in some form,” Trump said at the time. “I ​mean, whether I free it, take it. Think I can do anything I want with it. You want to know the truth.”

Months later in May, White House officials told Politico that what had originated as mild musings had since morphed into a genuine interest inside the Oval Office.

“The mood has definitely changed,” the person familiar with the White House’s discussions said. “The initial idea on Cuba was that the leadership was weak and that the combination of stepped-up sanctions enforcement, really an oil blockade, and clear U.S. military wins in Venezuela and Iran would scare the Cubans into making a deal. Now Iran has gone sideways, and the Cubans are proving much tougher than originally thought. So now military action is on the table in a way that it wasn’t before.”

Rubio then refused to say he wouldn’t invade Cuba while testifying in front of Congress in June, sparking deeper concerns about the administration’s machinations.

Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson is clearly bothered after fellow Republican Representative Thomas Massie forced a vote on the second Epstein Files Transparency Act, accusing Massie of staging a “political stunt.”

Johnson’s rebuke came one day after Massie secured enough signatures via discharge petition to force a vote on the Epstein Files Transparency Act II—which would allow members of Congress, attorneys general, and survivors to sue the Department of Justice for failing to comply with the original EFTA.

“Mr. Massie got 218 signatures for this Epstein bill to come to the floor.... Are you gonna try to fight this at all?” CNN’s Manu Raju asked Johnson.

“I have never fought getting the Epstein files out—” Johnson replied.

“But you fought that bill, the last bill.”

“What we tried to do all along is maintain principle and balance to protect the victims. I was concerned with their original gambit, which by the way, Thomas Massie did for attention,” Johnson said, arguing that Massie could have brought up the files while Biden was president. “All those files sat completely dormant … for the entire Biden administration.... They did this to go after President Trump.”

“Do you support this bill?” Raju asked.

“I haven’t seen this discharge, this is Thomas Massie trying to get attention again.... He’s just trying to cause chaos on the way out. We have always, I have always been for full transparency of the Epstein files,” Johnson said, refusing to answer the question.

Johnson’s diatribe caught Massie’s attention.

“Speaker of the House crashing out when asked about our new EFTA-II bill that will allow State Attorneys General to prosecute Epstein’s coconspirators, give survivors access to their files, and force the DOJ to release files they’re illegally withholding,” he commented on Raju’s interview with Johnson.

While the Justice Department claims to have withheld about three million files to protect victims, there are still questions about missing files and whose names were on them.

Former Vice President Mike Pence issued a scathing indictment of Donald Trump’s presidency and waning political influence Thursday, charging Trump to return to traditional conservative principles in light of what he described as a midterm “reckoning.”

The former MAGA co-chief slammed many of Trump’s second-term policies, during an interview with Fox News Thursday, railing the president’s tariffs and the “air of corruption” that has consumed the White House.

“I believe our voters rejected President Trump’s redirection of our movement toward protectionist tariffs, towards policies of appeasement towards Russia and even Iran, toward marginalizing the right to life,” Pence said. “And I think that the air of corruption around the Trump administration was very concerning to millions of Americans.”

Pence then moved his target toward Vice President JD Vance’s election postmortem. In the immediate aftermath of the election, Vance said GOP-aligned pollsters had identified four issues that overwhelmingly influenced voters: affordability, the Iran war, “America First,” and the current U.S.-Israel relationship.

Pence emphasized that the reasons underlying the election results were “much more complex than gasoline prices or the war in Iran.”

“There’s no question that the war in Iran became a frustration for millions of Americans, but it wasn’t because President Trump started the war or took on Iran,” Pence said. “It’s because we stopped short and didn’t finish it.”

“As Americans saw the politics of appeasement that the administration embraced, one negotiation after another, I think people became ... frustrated with the lack of progress, frustrated with the price of fuel at the pump,” he added.

Pence also chewed Vance out for highlighting a growing national interest in divesting from Israel.

“If the world knows nothing else, the world should know that America stands with Israel. Israel is our most cherished ally. It is the only democracy in the Arab world,” said Pence, an ardent Christian Zionist who has spent much of his political career defending Israel.