I mean, that doesn't seem that ridiculous. The story is, currently, mostly "oh, no, leather jacket nvidia guy got fired". In the alternate universe where this didn't leak, the story would instead, in early 2027, be "administration was covering up for the guy shagging the alleged spy, who has given the administration tens of millions of dollars for a ballroom". And I mean, that's part of the story now, but it's not really _dominating_ the story. From Trump's point of view, the current story is certainly better framing than "Trump covered this up, presumably because the guy was bribing him", which is how it would look if it came out in a congressional enquiry.

Honestly I'd expect more leaks of this type over the next month or so, as the administration prepares for scrutiny.

Trump is immune from even being investigated. He has the pardon power. I doubt he cares.

_He_ may not care. I'd assume a lot of the people who work for him are getting fairly nervous, though.

Trump blanket pardoned insurrectionists, some of whom were felons, committed violence, had history of rape, etc. His appointments know the price of a pardon is absolute loyalty or $1mm USD (or Trump coin equivalent).

So, even assuming that that magic pardon comes (and there are all sorts of ways that it might not; Trump is not, y'know, the most _reliable_), there would still be a huge _optics_ problem (actually, the pardon would make it worse). People are currently annoyed about corruption. If this had come out when a congressional investigation poked at it, then there would have been a very obvious narrative that would be extremely bad for Trump and more broadly for Republicans; rich guy gives $25m for Trump's vanity project, and rich guy's little problem just... goes away. I mean, it is very obvious how that could be framed.

And that narrative's still there, but I think probably subsumed a bit by the "nvidia kicks out CEO" story. Like, if I was a republican I'd definitely prefer to see this version of events than the "congressional investigation finds it" one.

> Trump is immune

Marco Rubio is not, and he - if he were to get a Trump pardon, that'd kill Rubio's chances of being POTUS.

De facto, or de jure?

> So your theory is that Trump allowed Nvidia to ignore Biden-era export controls, under the table?

Trump said it out loud that he knew for about a year.

> And now that that is likely to be exposed, they are pre-emptively leaking the story and taking on the case?

What case? Jensen resigned and that's the end of it. Which is the ideal outcome for the Secretary of State - or VP - who wishes to campaign for the presidency without being interrogated by the other party on what they knew about accepting a bribe from a compromised tech CEO. With the current news cycles, this story will be dead by the endom of the month.