In an interview with Reuters, US President Donald Trump said that he would intervene with the US Justice Department in the case against Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou if it would help secure a trade deal with China.
“If I think it’s good for what will be certainly the largest trade deal ever made – which is a very important thing – what’s good for national security, I would certainly intervene if I thought it was necessary”, he said.
POTUS further said that she could potentially be released:
“Well, it’s possible that a lot of different things could happen. It’s also possible it will be a part of negotiations. But we’ll speak to the Justice Department, we’ll speak to them, we’ll get a lot of people involved”.
When asked if he’d like Meng to be extradited to the US, Trump said he wanted to see the Chinese request first.
Earlier in the day, Justice William Ehrcke in Vancouver set bail for Meng at C$10 million. The judge said that she would be under surveillance 24 hours a day and will have to wear an electronic ankle tag, as well as to surrender all passports and travel documents.
The Huawei executive could be extradited to the United States to face fraud charges linked to the purported violation of sanctions regime on Iran.
The arrest came the same day Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping declared a 90-day truce in their trade war on the sidelines of the G20 summit talks in Buenos Aires. While the US president agreed not to raise tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports from 10 percent to 25 percent, his Chinese counterpart pledged to purchase more US goods to reduce the trade deficit.
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The US-Chinese trade war broke out after Trump slapped tariffs on some Chinese imports in order to fix a “trade deficit of $500 billion a year”, with Beijing retaliating in kind.