Huawei has not received a general amnesty from Trump

White House economic advisor Larry Kudlow responded Sunday to criticism of President Donald Trump’s controversial decision to allow Chinese telecom giant Huawei to buy US products, part of a truce Trump struck with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the G-20 summit in Japan over the weekend to ease trade war tensions. 

Kudlow said the administration has not removed Huawei from the blacklist that largely blocks the company from buying American products. Instead, the Commerce Department will simply grant more licenses to allow U.S. companies to sell products to Huawei so long as those sales pose no threat to national security, Kudlow said.

“This is not a general amnesty, if you will,” Kudlow said in an interview with Fox News Sunday. “Huawei will remain on the so-called entity list where there are serious export controls and in national security inferences or suggestions there won’t be any licenses.” 

Trump said he made the decision to allow Huawei to buy US products at the request of American “high tech companies.” The president said his administration will meet to more fully discuss the plan. 

“One of the things I will allow, however, is — a lot of people are surprised we send and we sell to Huawei a tremendous amount of product that goes into a lot of the various things that they make — and I said that that’s OK, that we will keep selling that product,” Trump said at the G-20 summit. 

The Semiconductor Industry Association — which says it represents 95% of the U.S. semiconductor industry including chip companies like Broadcom, Qualcomm and Intel among others — reacted positively to Trump’s truce with Xi in the trade war, but said it wanted more details about the plan regarding Huawei

“We are encouraged the talks are restarting and additional tariffs are on hold and we look forward to getting more detail on the president’s remarks on Huawei,” said John…