Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., said Friday that she supports calling Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to testify about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, intensifying pressure on a member of President Donald Trump’s inner orbit to go before the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability.
Mace and Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., spoke to reporters just before the committee began its highly anticipated deposition of former President Bill Clinton.
Asked by MS NOW if they would like to speak to Lutnick, Comer said they would “continue to ask questions of everyone that shows up in photos on the island and thing like that.” Pressed again by MS NOW whether that would include the commerce secretary, Comer demurred before Mace, who was standing next to him, nodded and said, “I will be asking him, yes.”
Democrats have pressed to get Lutnick and Trump before the committee to answer questions about their relationship with Epstein and his co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell.
Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., told reporters moments later that he was pleased to see Mace’s comments, adding that he believes there are enough votes on the committee to subpoena Lutnick.
Lutnick was once Epstein’s neighbor in Manhattan and spoke on a podcast last year about seeing massage tables in Epstein’s home and being “disgusted.” He maintained that he cut ties with the convicted sex offender in 2005, after that apartment encounter.
“My wife and I decided that I will never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again,” Lutnick told the New York Post. “So I was never in the room with him socially, for business, or even philanthropy. That guy was there, I wasn’t going because he’s gross.”
Documents since released by the Justice Department — only after Mace and two other Republican congresswomen broke with the administration and demanded their release — show Lutnick not only kept up that relationship but had lunch with Epstein on his island in 2012.
“We were on a family vacation,” Lutnick said during an unrelated February hearing on Capitol Hill, pushing back on there being “anything untoward about that” and acknowledging the emails that had become public between him and Epstein.
Asked during that hearing if he would commit to releasing his own records relating to Epstein, Lutnick stopped short of a “yes.”
“I will surely talk about that. I hadn’t thought about that,” he said. “I have nothing to hide. I have nothing to hide, absolutely nothing.”
Ali Vitali is MS NOW's senior congressional correspondent and the host of "Way Too Early." She is the author of "Electable: Why America Hasn’t Put a Woman in the White House … Yet."
Syedah Asghar
Syedah Asghar covers Congress for MSNBC.