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Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) introduced eight articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on the House floor Monday afternoon, and because the resolution is privileged, the House has to take it up within two legislative days, Fox News reported, which would put the vote no later than Wednesday.

According to AP, Massie is confident that three Republicans will join every Democrat to pass it. Passage takes a simple majority, and no Democrat appears likely to oppose it.

The articles cover the war in Iran, the strikes on suspected drug boats in the Caribbean, U.S. strikes against Yemen and the extradition of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. A further article accuses Hegseth of suppressing free speech by retaliating against Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) over a video urging troops to resist "unlawful orders."

Massie first filed the 34-page resolution in September and read it aloud on the floor for more than 67 minutes, until Speaker Mike Johnson canceled the remaining votes before the midterm recess. Massie said then that the articles would expire and he would have to refile them when Congress returned. He lost his own primary this summer after President Donald Trump endorsed his opponent, and he leaves Congress in January.

Several House Republicans told Fox News Digital that Hegseth could very well be impeached (none was named), with absences from Republicans who lost their elections and sour sentiment about his conduct possibly enough to tip it. Several Republicans have blamed the party's midterm losses on the Iran war, and Trump acknowledged last week that the war contributed to them.

Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), who is retiring, told ABC News, "I will weigh the debate and make a decision," adding that "the secretary has made some bad mistakes." House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) declined to back the effort. On the other side, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said Sunday on ABC's "This Week" that he is "a hard yes", as we reported.

Hegseth said Monday, "We're not worried about that," and announced a Pentagon press conference for Tuesday. In a video posted last Thursday, he called the filing "sham articles of impeachment," saying Democrats had "tried against President Trump twice," according to ABC News. Trump said Thursday that he has "every intention to keep" Hegseth, called Massie "a very bad guy" and said he is "very destructive."

Leaders can move to table the resolution, which also needs only a simple majority, or send it to committee. Either would end it without a vote on the merits, Fox said, and it was not clear Monday which way Johnson would go.

Conviction would need two-thirds of the Senate, which the AP called unlikely to happen even if the House impeaches. The last Cabinet secretary the House impeached was Biden's Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and the Democratic-led Senate dropped that case without a trial.

Update (1115ET): The Commerce Department's investigation into Megaspeed was halted late last year after Nvidia's general counsel reached out to the agents running it, the New York Times now reports.

According to the Times, investigators at Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security had spent months building a case that Megaspeed was smuggling Nvidia chips into China when, in August 2025, they got an email from Nvidia general counsel Tim Teter seeking information about the inquiry. Teter wrote that Jeff Kessler, their boss and a Trump-nominated under secretary, had given Nvidia permission to reach out about the case.

When the agents declined Nvidia's request to meet with one of them, Teter replied that he was unsure what the issue was, since Kessler had said Nvidia could communicate with the bureau's staff. The agents forwarded the chain to Kessler, who told them hours later to keep handling the case by the book. A Commerce official told the paper that Kessler never ordered anyone to share information with Nvidia. Some agents nonetheless saw his contact with Nvidia as a breach of procedure that could taint the case, and officials questioned why the department was discussing it at all with a company that had not been ruled out as a subject of the investigation.

Commerce disclosed the incident to partner agencies, the Justice Department asked it to pause its work, and the case went to DOJ, which is now running a criminal inquiry into Megaspeed. Agents who had spent months on the case were frustrated, and the handoff may have kept Commerce from moving faster to stop technology shipments to Megaspeed.

The Times also reports that since Trump's return, Kessler and other department leaders have required that any investigation into Nvidia first get their approval. Other agencies have proposed adding Megaspeed to the entity list, but Commerce hasn't acted, and the department has not added a single company to the entity list in more than a year, the longest such stretch in 18 years.

Commerce says it handled this and other actions strictly by the book, and DOJ declined to comment. Nvidia spokesman John Rizzo said the company consults with officials to help "halt any would-be smugglers." Megaspeed said it is conducting its own internal investigation and that its repeated offers to cooperate with the US government went unanswered.

All of which sits awkwardly next to Nvidia's line that the Megaspeed diversion claims were "investigated and debunked." Megaspeed itself has pointed to inspections by Commerce's BIS, Malaysia's trade ministry and Nvidia that it says found "no evidence of any violations," even as BIS agents were building a case that is now a criminal probe at DOJ. Commerce's own handling of Nvidia is now on the table for the Nov 18 closed-door briefing.

Nvidia shares slid more than 5% on Monday as the board probe sank in, with this latest revelation causing the leg down circled below. 

Beijing's foreign ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun rejected the "so-called Chinese spy narrative" as unsubstantiated, Secretary of State Marco Rubio declined to comment on Sunday, calling it an "internal corporate matter," and an Nvidia spokesperson insisted that "Today's news will not slow Nvidia." With Democrats having just won control of Congress, the oversight Lu describes is only likely to get tougher.

* * *

The affair was the headline. The chips were the point...

That, at least, is the read from Taiwanese semiconductor analyst Andrew Lu, whose take on the Nvidia (NVDA) spy scandal has been making the rounds on X courtesy of a translation by Jukan. It landed just hours after Jensen Huang told staff in a memo that "I was unfaithful to my wife", and Nvidia's board launched an independent investigation into whether its founder was the target of a foreign intelligence effort.

BOOM

*NVIDIA'S BOARD TO PROBE IF CEO WAS CHINESE INTELLIGENCE TARGET
*NVIDIA CEO JENSEN HUANG ADMITS AFFAIR WITH ALLEGED CHINESE SPY

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) November 8, 2026

A quick recap for anyone who spent the past ten days offline. On Oct 29 the New York Times reported that US intelligence had concluded Alice Huang (Huang Le, no relation), a senior executive at Singapore data center operator Megaspeed, was a Ministry of State Security asset with a close relationship to the Nvidia CEO, as we first reported at the time, and that Trump had been briefed a year ago and did nothing. Nvidia called the contacts "not unusual or unexpected." A week later three House GOP chairmen demanded a closed-door briefing on Nov 18, conveniently the day after Nvidia reports earnings. Then on Friday the FT reported the relationship was romantic, and on Sunday Huang confirmed it. So much for "not unusual."

Which brings us to Lu's argument: the scandal is a tool, and Washington just used it to get three things it could not get while Huang was the loudest voice in the room. We reproduce it in full below, with some context from our past coverage.

"The Purpose Of This Scandal Is By No Means To Expose An Affair"

Why the US Seized on the Scandal to Draw Its Sword: Three Strategic Objectives

The purpose of this scandal is by no means to expose an affair. It is to force through three critical objectives that had made no headway in the tech war between the US and China because Jensen Huang opposed them.

The first cut: Completely destroy the legitimacy of Jensen Huang's lobbying against sanctions in Washington

Over the past two years, the loudest and most influential business leader in Silicon Valley opposing a total ban on chip exports to China has been Jensen Huang. He has told the White House the same thing all along: "Cede the Chinese market to Huawei, and the only one that ends up dead is the American tech industry."

But the moment US intelligence labels the woman named as Huang's affair partner "a spy working for China's Ministry of State Security who sought to steer the US toward easing its chip controls," every bit of lobbying he has done for looser controls takes on an entirely different political meaning. It becomes a national security matter, raising the possibility that a foreign spy used a secret relationship to exert influence.

Huang can no longer say a single word in defense of the Chinese market before Congress or the White House. If he does, he will be branded as someone who "fell for an intelligence operation and still hasn't come to his senses."

Some context on just how successful that lobbying was. Huang first talked Trump into reversing the ban on the downgraded H20, and then in December struck the deal to sell the H200, Nvidia's second-most powerful chip, to China with Uncle Sam taking a 25% cut.

NVIDIA TO GIVE US 25% CUT OF H200 CHINA REVENUE: US OFFICIAL

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 8, 2025

Trump even toyed with letting Blackwell go to China before backing off. And it is worth remembering that, according to the FT, the intelligence memo describing the romance was circulated among top officials shortly before Trump's Beijing summit in May, yet Huang still got a last-minute seat on Air Force One (boarding during a stopover in Alaska) and a seat at the Xi state dinner in September. In other words, the lobbying worked right up until the moment the memo leaked. Funny how that timing works.

Ghost Offices And The Singapore Pipeline

The second cut: Reverse the H200 export approvals for China and sever the link between Chinese shell companies and Southeast Asian smuggling networks

Look at the timing of the two reports.

On November 8, the very day the Jensen Huang scandal broke, The New York Times published an investigation for which its reporters went in person to dozens of Chinese companies that the US Commerce Department had approved to handle Nvidia's H200 chips. New Matrix in Beijing was one of them. According to the report, the registered addresses of companies approved to buy the chips turned out to be empty "ghost offices," and some of the companies had close ties to entities on US sanctions lists and to firms under contract with the Chinese military.

One exposé says Nvidia's CEO was having an affair with a female spy from Megaspeed, the Singapore company that handled the chip smuggling. The other says the Chinese companies Commerce approved to buy H200s are nothing but shell companies trading on behalf of the Chinese military. The aim of these two reports is clear. They are meant to pressure the Trump administration and the Commerce Department into fully revoking or freezing H200 export approvals for China and, going further, to force a sweeping overhaul of the loophole that let chips be diverted through data centers run by third parties in Singapore and elsewhere in Southeast Asia.

As we detailed on Saturday, New Matrix's listed address in a Beijing industrial park turned out to be an empty shell with wires dangling from the ceiling, and its owners have ties to Wise Road, the PE firm the US blacklisted in 2024. Another approved assembler, Maginfra, also appeared deserted and is believed to be an Inspur offshoot (Inspur is on the entity list for working with the PLA). Not exactly the sort of due diligence one expects for the world's most coveted chip.

As for Southeast Asia, regular readers know this "loophole" has been leaking for a while. Back in March the US charged Super Micro's co-founder in an alleged $2.5 billion Nvidia chip smuggling scheme, and in May Bloomberg traced part of it to a Bangkok company, making Thailand a possible hub for chips headed to Alibaba. Megaspeed itself rents data center capacity in the region to, you guessed it, Alibaba. All of which makes Nvidia's response from last December age like milk:

*NVIDIA: HAVEN'T RECEIVED TIPS OF 'PHANTOM DATACENTERS'
*NVIDIA: SMUGGLING SEEMS FARFETCHED
*NVIDIA SAYS IT PURSUES ANY TIPS IT RECEIVES

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 10, 2025

A Watchdog In The Boardroom

The third cut: Put Nvidia on a national security leash through congressional oversight and an independent investigation

As the world's largest company by market cap and the dominant force in AI, Nvidia has until now enjoyed broad autonomy in how it runs its business. But in the wake of this incident, the three congressional committees responsible for China, foreign affairs, and intelligence have begun examining Nvidia's internal security measures directly. They have even pressured Nvidia's board into forming an independent investigation committee to look into the company's own founder and CEO.

In effect, Washington's national security establishment has planted a watchdog right inside Nvidia's board. From now on, the goal is to make sure that everything, down to where each and every one of Nvidia's high performance chips ends up, conforms strictly to US national security strategy. It also means there is no more room for skirting the edge of the rules or releasing chips with specs specially tailored to regulatory thresholds.

The board, for its part, says it has "no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised" and still has "confidence in Jensen." Which is exactly what boards say right before the outside counsel starts reading emails. Meanwhile there is no public succession plan and no obvious heir to the 63-year-old Huang, and as QTR asked earlier today, could the scandal force him to resign? For a stock where the CEO is the brand, that is a lot of key-man risk to price in a week.

"The Real Goal Was To Plug The Holes"

Conclusion

"The scandal was a detonator set off right on cue. The real goal was to plug the holes chips were leaking through."

Jensen Huang made the fatal mistake of letting his guard down in his private life and personal relationships. In the end, he fell into a honey trap, the textbook tactic of intelligence warfare, and was compromised. America's national security and intelligence agencies ruthlessly exploited the weakness his private life had exposed. As a result, they solved three thorny problems in a single stroke: Nvidia's lobbying at the White House to ease restrictions on China, the flow of H200 chips into Chinese shell companies, and smuggling routed through Singapore.

The closed congressional hearing set for November 18 will be the decisive turning point at which the US moves in earnest to tighten its sanctions on China's AI compute even further.

Lu's thesis has the virtue of explaining the timing: an intelligence finding that sat on desks for a year (and through a Beijing summit) suddenly surfacing in the NYT, then the FT, then Congress, all within ten days and right into Nvidia's earnings. One could argue the opposite, of course (an administration that knew and shrugged is hardly a sword-wielding one), and China has barely taken delivery of any H200s anyway (as of May, reportedly not a single one had shipped to the approved buyers). But whoever pulled the pin, the result is the same: the most effective lobbyist for selling AI chips to China has lost his voice, probably for good.

And that matters for more than Huang's marriage. As we noted on Nov 1, the entire market is already leaning on Nvidia's Nov 17 report; with the stock already off from its nearly $5.8 trillion October peak to below $5 trillion, investors now get earnings on Tuesday the 17th and a closed-door grilling on Wednesday the 18th. If Lu is right, the second date matters more, because what comes out of it is likely to be tighter controls, not looser ones. China revenue was always the upside option in the bull case. It now looks like the first casualty.

Source: Andrew Lu via Jukan:

Taiwanese semiconductor analyst Andrew Lu’s take on the recent scandal involving Jensen Huang:

Why the US Seized on the Scandal to Draw Its Sword: Three Strategic Objectives

— Jukan (@jukan05) November 9, 2026

Former White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles is facing new allegations that Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) activists were blacklisted from White House events after speaking out against alleged corruption involving the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Independent journalist Nick Monroe aired the accusations on X, citing an anonymous source who allegedly provided photographic evidence that activists had been barred from attending White House events. The photograph purports to show a White House document titled "Not Permitted List," identifying three activists allegedly barred from attending: Eden Marie Biele of the MAHA Mom Coalition, Emily Suzanne Bybee Stembridge of Moms Across America, and Alexandra Clark of Turning Point USA.

??THE GRIP OF SUSIE WILES. I've been looking into things.

Anonymous source sent this to me: the former White House Chief of Staff (allegedly) BANNED MAHA activists from events for speaking out against corruption in the EPA.

Photo proof attached. pic.twitter.com/K9gZb7d7nD

— Nick Monroe (@lobsterlooker) November 8, 2026

Prominent MAHA activist Courtney Swan appeared to corroborate part of the account, confirming that invitations had been abruptly withdrawn.

"It's true. We were invited, then our invite was retracted," Swan tweeted. "Someone sent us a photo of this packet that staff had at the front door. If you went through this stack of papers you'd find my name alongside other food activists that spoke out against Bayer's pesticide liability shield."

It's true. We were invited, then our invite was retracted. Someone sent us a photo of this packet that staff had at the front door. If you went through this stack of papers you'd find my name alongside other food activists that spoke out against Bayer's pesticide liability shield https://t.co/Nuia04jxw9

— Courtney Swan (@realfoodology) November 8, 2026

Healthy food activist Vani Hari, better known as "The Food Babe," also weighed in, claiming her name appeared elsewhere in the stack of documents.

This is ?? true. If you go further down the stack you will see me and other food activist badasses ?????????? https://t.co/SPRfQ5RH4M

— Vani Hari (@thefoodbabe) November 8, 2026

The photograph does not independently establish who created the list, whether the restrictions were enforced, or whether Susie Wiles ordered them.

The accusations come amid a widening controversy over Wiles' handling of President Donald Trump's MAHA agenda.

Last week, former White House adviser Calley Means unleashed a series of allegations during an appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast, accusing senior administration officials of undermining the movement while protecting powerful corporate interests.

"Susie Wiles is the most powerful chief of staff in modern American history," Means told Rogan, alleging that she exercised extraordinary control over White House policy decisions.

Means accused Wiles and her allies of interfering with efforts to challenge Bayer over glyphosate, the controversial herbicide used in Roundup, and claimed that Trump's then-chief of staff blocked an initiative examining sugar consumption among American children because of concerns about losing industry financial support.

"I need the sugar industry money. I need the money for the midterms," Means claimed Wiles told him.

Perhaps most damning of all, Means claimed Trump had no idea about some of the major decisions being made by senior officials in his own White House.

"There is a very concentrated group of people in the Trump administration that are antagonistic to what people voted for and are frankly, I think it's very clear, doing things for other reasons, particularly in many cases to enrich their families," he said.