It’s Friday, November 13. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Audrey Fahlberg interviews Harmeet Dhillon on why she quit the Trump administration. Roy Altman memorializes the federal judge who wasn’t afraid to talk politics outside the courtroom. Yuval Levin on how Congress’s new Democratic majority will move both parties to the right. And much more.

But first: the scandal of the decade?

Jensen Huang’s fall from grace this week is one of the year’s biggest spectacles in business, technology, and international politics. Yet now that the Nvidia founder has been ousted from the chip company he built into a titan, the world is still not sure what we’re looking at. The possibilities range from a salacious sex scandal à la Bill Clinton to a strategic betrayal akin to the Rosenbergs.

The plot thickened on Thursday as members of both parties called for Huang to testify before Congress. Lawmakers want to know whether the alleged Chinese spy with whom Huang had an affair helped smuggle restricted chips to her homeland—with or without Huang’s knowledge. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is facing similar heat, as critics allege that he loosened barriers on foreign chip sales despite being warned of a possible scheme.

These suspicions point to a gut-wrenching possibility: that the Donald Trump administration and major players in America’s AI industry undermined national security by turning a blind eye to Beijing scheming to evade export controls designed to stop U.S. chips making it into China.

That’s the theory that Matt Pottinger and Liza Tobin explore in their report today. A former top national security official and a leading China strategist, respectively, they chart the timeline of the administration’s moves and talk to former officials who say they were sidelined or pushed out of the Commerce Department after devising tighter technology restrictions. The details, they argue, amount to “a story of brazen regulatory capture: how Jensen Huang gained personal, persistent access to the president of the United States.” No matter which way you look at it, it doesn’t look good.

—Mene Ukueberuwa

The Free Press

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