US President Donald Trump thinks he might boost a China trade deal if he stops prosecutors from extraditing a Huawei Technologies Co (華為) executive, but he risks undermining the US justice system and endangering Americans abroad — not to mention angering the US Congress.
Trump said he would intervene in the case against Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou (孟晚舟) if he thought it would affect trade talks with Beijing in an interview with Reuters on Tuesday.
The remarks drew a backlash from some US lawmakers and former government officials, and raised alarms in foreign capitals.
Trump said he would base his decision on national security concerns, adding that his ongoing negotiations with China over “what will be certainly the largest trade deal ever made” were “a very important thing.”
Meng, accused of conspiring to defraud banks in a manner that put them at risk of breaching US sanctions on Iran, was arrested in Canada on the same day that Trump met with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) for tense trade talks.
As the chief executive, the president has the power to intervene in the case, former federal prosecutors say, but blocking prosecutors from extraditing Meng could provoke other countries to detain US citizens as leverage in political and economic negotiations, and erode the US’ standing in future extradition requests, they said.
“There’s action the president could take, but it would have at a minimum significant political ramifications,” said Brian Michael, a former federal prosecutor, who is now a partner at law firm King & Spalding LLP.
Trump would mostly likely intervene by ordering the US Department of State not to go forward with the extradition, Michael said. Once extradition happens, it would be much more difficult, unusual and messy for the White House to try to control the US Department of Justice’s prosecution, he said.
Administration officials on Wednesday downplayed Trump’s remarks.
US Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross told reporters they were “drawing a lot of conclusions from a potential decision that he has yet to make.”
However, lawmakers expressed concern.
US Senator Chris van Hollen cautioned against linking Meng’s arrest with Trump’s trade talks.
“It is a very dangerous road to go down, if we were to get into a world where people were detained based on a trade and tariff war rather than on the law,” he said in an interview.
US Senator Marco Rubio said it would be “a terrible mistake” for Trump to intervene in the case.
“It’s unrelated to trade policy,” he said.
Trump’s comments could factor into the legal proceedings in Canada, where Meng faces an extradition hearing before any handover to US authorities. She was released on bail on Tuesday.
“Meng’s lawyers could use Trump’s remarks as evidence to argue that the prosecution against her is politicized,” Robert Currie, a law professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, who specializes in extradition law, said in an e-mail.
Meng’s lawyers could ask for a stay of proceedings or ask Canadian Minister of Justice Jody Wilson-Raybould to not hand her over, he said.
Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland also said that Trump’s comments could affect the case.
“It will be up to Ms Meng’s lawyers whether they choose to raise comments in the US as part of their defense of Ms Meng,” she said at a news conference.
CHIP RACE: Three years of overbroad export controls drove foreign competitors to pursue their own AI chips, and ‘cost US taxpayers billions of dollars,’ Nvidia said China has figured out the US strategy for allowing it to buy Nvidia Corp’s H200s and is rejecting the artificial intelligence (AI) chip in favor of domestically developed semiconductors, White House AI adviser David Sacks said, citing news reports. US President Donald Trump on Monday said that he would allow shipments of Nvidia’s H200 chips to China, part of an administration effort backed by Sacks to challenge Chinese tech champions such as Huawei Technologies Co (華為) by bringing US competition to their home market. On Friday, Sacks signaled that he was uncertain about whether that approach would work. “They’re rejecting our chips,” Sacks
It is challenging to build infrastructure in much of Europe. Constrained budgets and polarized politics tend to undermine long-term projects, forcing officials to react to emergencies rather than plan for the future. Not in Austria. Today, the country is to officially open its Koralmbahn tunnel, the 5.9 billion euro (US$6.9 billion) centerpiece of a groundbreaking new railway that will eventually run from Poland’s Baltic coast to the Adriatic Sea, transforming travel within Austria and positioning the Alpine nation at the forefront of logistics in Europe. “It is Austria’s biggest socio-economic experiment in over a century,” said Eric Kirschner, an economist at Graz-based Joanneum
BUBBLE? Only a handful of companies are seeing rapid revenue growth and higher valuations, and it is not enough to call the AI trend a transformation, an analyst said Artificial intelligence (AI) is entering a more challenging phase next year as companies move beyond experimentation and begin demanding clear financial returns from a technology that has delivered big gains to only a small group of early adopters, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Taiwan said yesterday. Most organizations have been able to justify AI investments through cost recovery or modest efficiency gains, but few have achieved meaningful revenue growth or long-term competitive advantage, the consultancy said in its 2026 AI Business Predictions report. This growing performance gap is forcing executives to reconsider how AI is deployed across their organizations, it said. “Many companies
France is developing domestic production of electric vehicle (EV) batteries with an eye on industrial independence, but Asian experts are proving key in launching operations. In the Verkor factory outside the northern city of Dunkirk, which was inaugurated on Thursday, foreign specialists, notably from South Korea and Malaysia, are training the local staff. Verkor is the third battery gigafactory to open in northern France in a region that has become known as “Battery Valley.” At the Automotive Energy Supply Corp (AESC) factory near the city of Douai, where production has been under way for several months, Chinese engineers and technicians supervise French recruits. “They
RSS