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MF Michael Feinberg Michael Feinberg Senior Editor at Lawfare covering the intelligence community and national security, and a former Assistant Special Agent in Charge with the FBI who spent most o...

“The United States looks pretty damn foolish as a result of this. That's a motivation for China itself to do a controlled release of this information, particularly if the affair is now over and they're not going to get anything else out of it.”

The Lawfare Podcast · Policy · November 2026

“The United States looks pretty damn foolish as a result of this. That's a motivation for China itself to do a controlled release of this information, particularly if the affair is now over and they're not going to get anything else out of it.” — Michael Feinberg, The Lawfare Podcast

Context

The host asked who leaked the Huang story to the press, suggesting a US intelligence insider unhappy with inaction. Feinberg agrees that is probable, but adds two other possibilities: an allied service, or China itself releasing it once the asset had stopped being useful.

Transcript

The Lawfare Podcast Around 09:54 into the episode
Speaker 3

…And that's powerful knowledge for them. If they know that they still have another two years where the Commerce Department or the Justice Department can be dissuaded from, you know, furiously investigating potential violations of national security laws, that's really valuable for them to know.

Kate Klonick

…and failed to do something. So somebody within the administration or intelligence decided to take this to the reporters. That's a pretty significant that is in my, I am not even an expert in these things. And I'm like, oh, that's not, that's not great. So give us a little bit more nuanced analysis.

Speaker 3

…famous one being the Five Eyes. And most of those nations have not descended into the circus sideshow of national security that the United States has been for the past two years. And as a result, there are other nations who also don't want China to become a preeminent hyperpower. They'd also have an incentive to leak this and stop it from happening. And there's one third possibility as well. The United States looks pretty damn foolish as a result of this. That's a motivation for China itself to do a controlled release of this information, particularly if the affair is now over and they're not going to get anything else out of it. So, you know, somebody clearly leaked it. That much is obvious. It was probably somebody from the United States, but there's always a possibility that it was a foreign national from a country-friendly Orfoe.

Kate Klonick

So I just kind of want to also put a timeline on the very, like, now we're talking about Trump's admiration for Jensen Huang, like, but that was not always the case. And in fact, around the same time that he was last seen with Alice Wang, the supposed honeypot that he has been linked to, Jensen…

Speaker 3

It's entirely possible. And if I were, you know, a newly made member of the majority in Congress conducting oversight hearings, this would probably be something into which I wanted to look. We don't know for certain. I mean, things we do know that would slightly mitigate against this scenario…

Speaker 2

Hey, folks, Ben Wittis here. And I want to tell you about a time long ago when my household was carrying some debt. It was student debt by current standards. It wasn't the biggest deal in the world, but it felt like a big deal. We didn't

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

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