President Trump will allow the resumption of shipments of U.S. technology to Huawei. At a press conference following the G20 meetings in Osaka, Japan, Trump said the issue of Huawei should be saved until the end of the newly-resumed trade negotiations.
Trump’s comments on Huawei were redacted by the White House as follows:
Q: Did you agree that Huawei can sell to the U.S. or that U.S. companies can sell to Huawei?
THE PRESIDENT: U.S. companies can sell their equipment to Huawei. I’m talking about equipment where there is no great national emergency problem with it. But the U.S. companies can sell their equipment. So we have a lot of the great companies in, Silicon Valley and based in different parts of the country, that make extremely complex equipment. We’re letting them sell to Huawei.
Q: Demetri Sevastopulo, Financial Times. Can I just ask, first, one clarification?
THE PRESIDENT: Sure.
Q: Are you saying you’re taking Huawei off the Commerce Department entity list?
THE PRESIDENT: No, not at all. No, no. We’re going to be talking about Huawei, but we are going to be supplying equipment from our companies. Our companies make billions and billions of dollars’ worth of equipment. But we are not discussing Huawei with President Xi yet. I want to see — before we start getting into that, I want to see where we end up. We have to — we have a national security problem, which to me is paramount. Very important.
Q: But are you taking Huawei off the Commerce Department entity list?
THE PRESIDENT: We’re talking about that. We have a meeting on that tomorrow or Tuesday.
Q: Thank you, Mr. President. I actually have a Russia question but I wanted to quickly clarify: Is Meng Wanzhou’s case also going to need to wait until the very end? Or is it possible the U.S. would drop the extradition effort?
THE PRESIDENT: When what? On what?
Q: Ms. Meng from Huawei. The top financial (inaudible).
THE PRESIDENT: We didn’t discuss Ms. Meng. We didn’t — that was not discussed. We did discuss Huawei but we didn’t discuss her situation.
The sudden reversal from the Trump administration drew some challenges from his own party on Capitol Hill.
If President Trump has in fact bargained away the recent restrictions on #Huawei, then we will have to get those restrictions put back in place through legislation.
And it will pass with a large veto proof majority.
— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) June 29, 2019
If President Trump has agreed to reverse recent sanctions against #Huawei he has made a catastrophic mistake.
It will destroy the credibility of his administrations warnings about the threat posed by the company,no one will ever again take them seriously. https://t.co/jEhHcblsVG
— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) June 29, 2019
