President Trump has not taken the idea of investigations of his administration lightly. On Saturday, November 7, he posted on social media that he was ordering the Department of Justice to investigate Democrats’ promises to investigate the administration’s corruption and mismanagement, calling those promises “criminal.” On Monday, November 9, White House counsel Will Scharf, the top lawyer in the White House, sent a letter to Representative Robert Garcia (D-CA), who is expected to take over the House Oversight Committee, warning that the Democrat’s promise to investigate the actions of the Trump administration “may cross the line into blatant criminality.” Scharf leaned on the requirement that Congress’s investigations must have a legislative purpose—a requirement that current Republican chair James Comer of Kentucky ignored—and charged that Democratic lawmakers are issuing “abusive and capricious threats…to intimidate and to interfere with the lawful functioning of government.” Then, on November 11, Aaron Reitz, the U.S. attorney in for the Southern District of Texas, wrote to Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), who is in line to chair the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations after January, claiming that Blumenthal’s plans to investigate who donated to Trump’s ballroom and other pet causes, and under what circumstances, was an unconstitutional attempt to prevent free association. He continued, suggesting that Blumenthal was trying “to intimidate citizens for engaging in philanthropic practices that will benefit our nation for generations.” Threatening Blumenthal with “significant legal consequences” for “you, your staff, employees, agents, consultants, campaign personnel, and any other person acting on your behalf or in concert with you,” he demanded Blumenthal preserve all records “relevant to your intent to deprive citizens of their core constitutional rights.” Garcia and Blumenthal were having none of it. Garcia told A. MartÃnez and Majd Al-Waheidi of NPR, “We’re not going to be deterred, and we’re certainly not going to be intimidated by Donald Trump or anyone in the administration.” Garcia said that among the committee’s top priorities would be investigating Trump family corruption, including a $2 billion investment in Jared Kushner’s investment firm, and looking into allegations of corrupt contracts involving former Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem and former DHS advisor Corey Lewandowski. “Our job is to investigate, to take issues to the courts, to make criminal referrals, and to write good legislation so that this kind of corruption doesn’t happen again,” Garcia said. Blumenthal wrote back to Reitz, saying that his letter was “just the latest in a series of unlawful actions on the part of the Trump Administration attempting to intimidate Members of Congress for engaging in constitutionally protected activity” and adding, “Your implied threat of an investigation is baseless.” He warned: “I will not be intimidated.” Blumenthal told Reitz to preserve records himself, writing: “The public deserves to know the terms under which dozens of American companies were persuaded to donate millions of dollars to the President’s vanity projects, and whether lawsuits were dismissed, contracts were awarded, or regulations went unenforced in exchange for that money. The public deserves transparency about whether the White House and the corporations it cajoled extracted favors at the expense of American taxpayers. Not only are these appropriate subjects for congressional oversight, but such inquiries are among the constitutional duties that Members of Congress must undertake to become informed about matters on which legislation may be necessary.” When it appeared bullying wouldn’t work, Trump turned to rage and self-pity. Yesterday morning, at 5:50, he tried to insist that it was the Democrats, not him, who are corrupt. “The Democrat Party, lead [sic] by one of the most Corrupt and anti-American groups of political leaders and hacks in the history of our Country, and even the World, is doing everything in their power to get away from MASSIVE BLUE STATE CORRUPTION by saying, over and over again, that the Trump Administration is corrupt,” he posted. “THE DEMOCRATS ARE CORRUPT AND EVIL, and I am the exact opposite!” Then, echoing the words he used at his rally at the Ellipse on January 6, 2021, before he urged the crowd to move to the U.S. Capitol, he added: “Fight hard, Republicans, or you won’t have a Country left!” He continued to rage post about Democrats’ corruption through the morning. But by the afternoon, Attorney General Todd Blanche was walking back the suggestion that Democratic lawmakers’ promise to conduct oversight had been criminal. “There can come a point when a criticism becomes a threat, and then when a threat becomes something criminal and…I never said that that point has been crossed. I haven’t said that,” Blanche told reporters. Scharf, too, backpedaled, saying on Newsmax that all he had asked for was “that everybody follows the law.” Even as the administration suggests congressional investigations into its behavior might be criminal, a monumental scandal has erupted in the administration. The chief executive officer of Nvidia, the maker of the highly advanced chips at the center of AI development, resigned yesterday after news broke that he has been engaged in an extramarital affair with a woman believed to be a Chinese spy. On October 29, Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman, Ana Swanson, Paul Mozur, Tripp Mickle, and Julian E. Barnes of the New York Times reported that about a year ago, intelligence agents had informed Trump that Nvidia’s Jensen Huang was engaged in an affair with Alice Huang, a woman assessed to be a Chinese intelligence agent. But Trump “chose not to do anything with the information.” Ms. Huang worked for Megaspeed, a company that buys Nvidia chips and then provides computing power to Chinese companies. It has been suspected of being a cut-out company that smuggles chips to China. According to the New York Times journalists, intelligence agents thought Ms. Huang was funneling information to Beijing. On Thursday, November 5, House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Brian Mast (R-FL), House Select Committee on China chair John Moolenaar (R-MI), and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence chair Rick Crawford (R-AR) wrote to Huang requesting that he appear before their committees to brief them on his interactions with Ms. Huang, “a publicly reported People’s Republic of China (PRC) intelligence asset, and NVIDIA’s security protocols against foreign adversary espionage.” “Recent reports raise significant national security concerns regarding the PRC’s access to sensitive U.S. technology and information,” they wrote. “It is vital that Congress determines the extent to which U.S. national security has been placed at risk.” On Sunday, November 8, Huang admitted the affair and Nvidia’s board announced it was opening an independent investigation into whether Huang was the “target of a foreign intelligence effort.” On Monday, November 9, Nvidia’s stock began to drop, and on November 11 the New York Times reported on a second affair. On November 12, Nvidia’s stock price dropped from $151 billion to $135 billion. As Maureen Farrell and Rob Copeland of the New York Times reported, with Huang at the helm, Nvidia has bankrolled much of the nation’s AI buildout, and his support for it has kept the money rolling in. Huang has boosted AI as important to the national security of the United States and key to the nation’s future. After Huang resigned yesterday, just hours before news broke of a third relationship, Nvidia’s value fell again. Over the course of the week, the company lost nearly $493 billion in market value. The crisis is dividing the administration. As Ian Duncan, Zach Dorfman, and Warren P. Strobel of the Washington Post reported this afternoon, Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, along with Huang, wanted to let Nvidia sell chips to China in exchange for a 15% cut of the revenue going to the U.S. government. In contrast, the journalists explain, “a bipartisan group of government officials, lawmakers and think tank analysts…view Nvidia’s chips as a vital asset in the rivalry between the two nations and one that the U.S. should strictly control.” When Trump, who as of November 9 owned more than $12.5 million of Nvidia stock, told reporters he had not been informed about Huang’s relationship with Ms. Huang, sources told Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan, Julian E. Barnes, Ana Swanson, and Tripp Mickle of the New York Times that he had indeed been informed: Secretary of State Marco Rubio had told him, and the president had nonetheless brought Huang with him on a trip to China. On CNBC today, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent blamed Lutnick for failing to put Megaspeed on an export blacklist. Luke Fountain of CNBC reported today that Cantor Fitzgerald, the financial services firm Lutnick used to chair and which his sons now run, has extensive ties to Nvidia. On Fox Business today, host Stuart Varney summed up the scandal during a discussion of its national security implications: “[W]e have to ask if anyone in the administration had a financial interest in getting those chips through to Beijing. That’s what this is all about, really, isn’t it?” Trump was nowhere to be seen this afternoon when the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) abruptly grounded all planes in the U.S. for about five hours forcing 6,600 flights to be canceled and another 8,600 delayed, stranding passengers across the country. Trump’s only communication with the public was a long post about the entertainment industry. When Treasury Secretary Sean Duffy held a press conference about the crisis, he blamed Congress for not fixing the system and demanded $50 billion to update it. “Cut the crap,” Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker posted. “Trump and Republicans have controlled Congress and could have funded the system. The public needs real answers and immediate action.” But it wasn’t going to get them from the president. When a reporter said to Duffy at a press conference, “You say this is a priority for President Trump. Why have we not heard from him at all on this issue since it happened?” Duffy answered: “The two of us have talked to him.” Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg stepped in to explain that “the system has many redundancies in it, so that normally, if there’s one point of failure, something else can catch it.” During his tenure, the most extreme disruption to air travel lasted about an hour and a half when a system failed, he said, but “there were actually four different systems, and when one of them went out, another one could be brought online to cover that. So it is not clear to me why that redundancy did not prevent an outage of this magnitude in terms of scope and duration. This is the biggest nationwide ground stop since 9/11. But again, we don’t know much. I certainly don’t want to speculate.” Asked about Trump administration officials’ charge that the Biden administration hadn’t upgraded the system, Buttigieg answered: “Well, we did a lot to upgrade the system.” He added: “When we had an outage, I didn’t stand there complaining about the Trump administration. We got to work, and I’m certain that that’s what the career officials and the career day-to-day employees at FAA and USD[epartment] O[f] T[ransportation] are doing. This should not be about politics.
— Notes: https://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/static/2026/11/Garcia-Letter-Signed_11.10.2026.pdf blumenthal.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/20261111_letter_from_rm_blumenthal_to_aaron_reitzpdf.pdf https://www.politico.com/news/2026/11/12/todd-blanche-justice-department-democrats-oversight https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/29/us/politics/nvidia-china-jensen-huang-trump.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/11/technology/jensen-huang-nvidia-affair.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/13/business/jensen-huang-nvidia-wall-street.html https://money.usnews.com/investing/articles/stocks-owned-by-donald-trump https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/10/us/politics/trump-china-trip-nvidia.html https://www.cnn.com/2026/11/13/politics/bessent-lutnick-nvidia-megaspeed-blame https://www.cnbc.com/2026/11/13/howard-lutnick-nvidia-jensen-huang-china-cantor-fitzgerald.html Trump’s Truth: X: USAttyReitz/status/2120632462686711838/photo/1 Bluesky: anthonymkreis.bsky.social/post/3n23d2npobc25 atrupar.com/post/3n27vcwl3gk2h flightradar24.com/post/3n27uz5p42c2d nothoodlum.bsky.social/post/3n2agqqqkzs24 govpritzker.illinois.gov/post/3n2agxnrb7c2d thebulwark.com/post/3n2agskodwb2s You’re currently a free subscriber to Letters from an American. If you need help receiving Letters, changing your email address, or unsubscribing, please visit our Support FAQ. You can also submit a help request directly. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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