CNN correspondent Jamie Gangel is suggesting that Howard Lutnick, President Donald Trump’s Commerce Secretary, may already be in jeopardy in the administration. Her assertion comes despite Trump’s public statements expressing loyalty to him. Gangel says Trump’s loyalty is limited and can change at any time.
The controversy centers on concerns that sensitive American technology may have ended up in the hands of individuals connected to Chinese intelligence. Alice Huang, a former Nvidia employee who reportedly had a relationship with CEO Jensen Huang, is suspected by U.S. intelligence officials of having ties to Chinese intelligence. The allegations have yet to be proven.
Lutnick is responsible for overseeing limits on the export of sensitive American technology. Despite reportedly receiving warnings, he allegedly pushed back against efforts to place the company on a government blacklist, which would have resulted in restricting its access to U.S. technology. Trump’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reportedly confronted Lutnick during a White House meeting, insisting that the company posed a national security risk, which Lutnick reportedly also ignored, as well as other warnings from other Cabinet officials.
“So the president has said he has complete confidence in Lutnick until he doesn’t. My reporting is that he’s been on borrowed time for a while. This is not good,” Gangel said during a recent roundtable discussion on the matter. “I also spoke to some national security and intelligence experts who really look at this from the perspective of ‘Was the system working?’ And since commerce is the focus of this, the questions they’re asking are, ‘What did Lutnick know? When did he know it? And what did he do about it?’ And to hear the Treasury Secretary talk about it, he didn’t do anything about it that other people in the Cabinet thought he should do.”
When speaking of members of Trump’s administration calling for Lutnick to be dismissed, and Trump trying internally to clean up Lutnick’s alleged mess, CNN Senior White House correspondent Kristen Holmes said Lutnick is not a favorable asset internally, and is seen more as a liability. Still, she says how Trump really feels is unknown.
“Lutnick is already not super popular anyway within the administration. Trump likes him, and they have a longstanding relationship. But there are already people who think that he speaks out of turn, that he puts his foot in his mouth too much, that he’s too close to Trump, literally, in terms of physicality, like he’s always around, which we know in this administration there’s proximity to power. So, you’re getting a lot of calls saying that Lutnick needs to go. What we don’t have, and what we don’t know, is how Trump is handling this, because he’s not, as far as we are told by our sources, indicating which way he’s going to go on Lutnick,” Holmes says.