Nvidia's CEO lobbied months to loosen China chip limits, then denied knowing his girlfriend spied for China.

…(cont) I want to go back further before I go forward, because I don't want to get ahead of the page. The Post — not the Examiner, the Post is the one carrying the picture — ran a photograph from 2024. Mr. Huang and the woman, at a bar, sharing whiskey, after she had reportedly told other tech executives how much access to him she had. Two years before most of the country heard her name.

Then on October 29th, the Times reported that Mr. Huang had been seen as a target of a Chinese spy plot. First time the public got anywhere near this. I underlined that date, because everything that follows gets measured against it.

Then the letter I already told you about. November 5th. The good one.

Then today. Mr. Huang told the President directly, according to the Times, that he had no idea about the woman. The President said he believed him — said it the way a man vouches for a neighbor at a cookout. He did not say he had sat for the briefing the letter asked for. He said he did not recall being briefed at all. Same Monday, Mr. Jeffries said — I've got this one highlighted — that he "strongly supports" folding tighter chip-export restrictions into the defense bill.

Here's the part that sent me back to the dates a second time. The same paper that ran the photograph also reported that Mr. Huang had spent months lobbying the President to loosen the very export limits Mr. Jeffries now wants tightened — and that the lobbying runs back before October 29th. Before the letter. Before that gap I keep circling back to.

Did the ask come before the denial, or after? I've got the months on one line of the page and that same stretch of days on another, and no matter how I write them out, they won't switch places.

At the bank, when the line is long, there's a reason for it: they count before they hand anything back. The counting comes first every time I've stood in that line. I don't know a teller window that pays out before it counts. Does the briefing in that letter work any different? I don't know. The letter doesn't say whether it ever happened.

Excuse me — before you go, one more thing, because I almost left without it. The letter asked for a briefing. Days later, with no hearing on the record, the President said he believed him anyway. And the lobbying the Post reported — the months of it — was already finished, on the books, done, before the spy story had a date on it at all. So tell me which one you'd put first: the months he spent asking, or the five days.