Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick grilled over ties to Epstein

Lawmakers laid into Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on Tuesday about his association with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, hammering him over the Epstein files showing the two having ties long after Lutnick claimed he’d cut them.

The Senate Appropriations hearing was Lutnick’s first appearance before Congress after troves of records released by the Justice Department late last month demonstrated he maintained a personal and business relationship with Epstein for more than a decade after the late financier’s 2008 guilty plea in Florida to state charges of soliciting prostitution with a minor.

The revelations have led to bipartisan calls for Lutnick’s resignation. 

“The issue is not that you engaged in any wrongdoing in connection with Jeffrey Epstein, but that you totally misrepresented the extent of your relationship with him to the Congress, to the American people and to the survivors of his despicable criminal and predatory acts,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen, the top Democrat on the committee.

The hearing had been called by the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce to evaluate the Biden-era Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program, which is administered by the Department of Commerce.

But committee Democrats used the opportunity to grill Lutnick over his portrayal of his relationship to Epstein.

Lutnick had previously denied maintaining involvement with Epstein past 2005. The pair met after Lutnick, a prominent investment banker on Wall Street prior to joining President Donald Trump’s second administration, moved into a townhome next to Epstein in New York, according to an interview Lutnick gave last year on the podcast Pod Force One. But the commerce secretary said he severed all social, business and philanthropic ties to Epstein following a visit in 2005 to his townhouse. 

“If that guy was there, I wasn’t going because he’s gross,” Lutnick said during the interview.

The files released last month indicate Lutnick kept up a mutual relationship with Epstein long after that. Lutnick visited Epstein’s private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands with his wife, children, nanny and another family in 2012, according to the files.

Lutnick confirmed the island trip during Tuesday’s hearing.

“Did you in fact make the visit to Epstein’s private island?” Van Hollen asked. 

“My wife was with me as were my four children and nannies. We had lunch on the island. That’s true. For an hour. We left with all of my children,” Lutnick said.

He added that he had met with Epstein twice over the course of the 14 years following their initial meeting in 2005, noting he did not interact with Epstein again until 2011. 

Shortly after that 2012 lunch on the island, the files indicate, Lutnick and Epstein invested in the same private company, AdFin Solutions Inc. Epstein later made attempts to communicate with Lutnick about real estate, according to records in the files.

In 2015, Lutnick appeared to invite Epstein to an “intimate” fundraising event for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, which Lutnick had been fundraising for at the time. In 2017, Epstein donated $50,000 to a New York charity in honor of Lutnick, according to the files. 

“Of these millions and millions of documents, there may be 10 emails connecting me with him, probably about 10 emails connecting me with him, over a 14-year period,” Lutnick said Tuesday. “I did not have any relationship with him. I barely had anything to do with that person.”

A series of emails included in the files indicated Lutnick’s lawyer sent the resume of Lutnick’s family nanny to Epstein, who had expressed interest in meeting her. The documents do not contain confirmation that the meeting occurred.

Asked about Epstein’s alleged interest in meeting his family nanny, Lutnick said he had “no idea” whether it was the same nanny he brought to Epstein’s island in 2012. 

“I have no idea about that whole thing. I mean, I don’t recall it having anything to do with me,” Lutnick said. He added that Maxwell was not on the island when he met with Epstein. 

Lutnick has staunchly denied criminal involvement with Epstein and appearing in the files is not an indication of wrongdoing, but it has done little to assuage calls from lawmakers for his resignation.

“He’s got a lot to answer for,” Republican Rep. Thomas Massie, who co-sponsored the law that forced the release of the Epstein files, said in a CNN interview last week. “But really, he should make life easier on the president, frankly, and just resign.”

The Epstein materials, which the Justice Department says have now been released in full, also include numerous references to Trump, Elon Musk and other famous and prominent people, though there is no evidence of any wrongdoing by any of the principals mentioned in the files.