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JB Julian Barnes On The Bulwark

“Jensen Huang was not given a defensive briefing so far as we know. The FBI did not pull him in and say, look, this woman you're having a relationship with is a Chinese spy. She is an intelligence asset. So the question is, why didn't they do it?”

The Bulwark · Policy · November 2026

“Jensen Huang was not given a defensive briefing so far as we know. The FBI did not pull him in and say, look, this woman you're having a relationship with is a Chinese spy. She is an intelligence asset. So the question is, why didn't they do it?” — Julian Barnes, The Bulwark

Context

The host asked what the US government knew and when. Barnes laid out what is known and said the missing piece is why no one warned the Nvidia CEO, listing possible reasons such as wanting to keep collecting intelligence.

Transcript

The Bulwark
Julian Barnes

She's a Chinese national.

Catherine Rampell

…know about when the Trump administration, when its suspicions arose and why it, I don't know if it, I don't know if looking the other way is the right way to phrase this, but why it doesn't seem to have intervened. And the president continued to have a pretty close relationship with Johnson Huang.

Julian Barnes

These are really good questions, very important questions to us, I'm sure to the Wall Street Journal and the FT and all other journalists pursuing this. What we've offered our readers right now are two concrete data points. One, October 2025, the president is briefed about this intelligence that Jensen Wong has a relationship with a Chinese Spy. We have offered our readers the other data point of this spring, Marco Rubio authoring a memo, highly classified to a select group of White House officials that Alice Wong was an operative of the Chinese Ministry of State Security and had a relationship with Jensen Wong. Obviously, you know, the New York Times, Bloomberg, and others start reporting about Mega Speaker. Of speed last year. The government is looking at it at that time. But exactly when the U.S. learned Alice Wong was a spy, we don't know yet, right? And another key question is: Jensen Wong was not given a defensive briefing so far as we know. The FBI did not pull him in and say, Look, this woman you're having a relationship…

Catherine Rampell

I want to play for you an exchange in which Donald Trump was asked about what he knew and why he didn't respond any earlier.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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