Scott Bessent: “But Commerce has the pen... and you will have to ask them about their internal process.”

“for months” he has been in favor of putting Megaspeed, the data company whose executive is an alleged Chinese spy, on a trade blacklist to stop Nvidia from exporting advanced chips to Beijing.

“We don’t repeat conversations in the Situation Room,” he said.

“You will have to ask them about their internal process,” the treasury secretary added in an interview with CNBC on Friday.

What we are here to do is to prosecute criminal fraud. And any question like that that deflects away from it, I think is a waste of our time.