Donald Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick evaded questions from members of Congress about his relationship to Jeffrey Epstein and refused to say whether he talked to the president about his closed-door deposition, according to Democrats on a panel investigating the late pedophile.
Lutnick, the first Trump Cabinet official to testify to the House Oversight Committee about Epstein, has denied any wrongdoing in relation to the wealthy and well-connected sex offender, who died in jail awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges in 2019.
The release of millions of documents stemming from investigations into Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell revealed that the former Cantor Fitzgerald chief had remained in contact with Epstein until at least 2018. He later admitted to visiting the billionaire on his private island in 2012.
“Now we know why that interview was not videotaped,” Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna told reporters after Lutnick’s deposition on Wednesday.
“If Donald Trump had seen the video transcript, he would’ve fired Howard Lutnick,” he said. “It was really embarrassing. He was asked really straightforward questions about whether he regretted misleading the American people. … It was contortions and lies, and no acknowledgement that he misled the American public.”
In October, Lutnick told Pod Force One that he had been a neighbor of Epstein’s in New York and once visited his Upper East Side brownstone in 2005 but was appalled when his host made a creepy comment about receiving “the right kind of massages” during a tour of the property.
He later told the Senate Appropriations Committee that he and his family had lunch with Epstein on his private Caribbean island Little St. James in December 2012.
“We had lunch on the island, that is true, for an hour,” he testified in February. “Then we left with all of my children, with my nannies and my wife all together. … We were on family vacation. We were not apart. To suggest there was anything untoward about that in 2012… I don’t recall why we did it. But we did.”
After Wednesday’s deposition, a group of Democrats on the committee accused him of lying and demanded his resignation.
Lutnick’s answers to the committee’s questions about why he agreed to visit the island despite allegedly cutting ties with Epstein years earlier made “a farce of the English language,” Khanna told reporters.
Lutnick told the committee that his visit to the island was “inexplicable and unsettling,” according to Democrats.
“What we heard was hours of testimony where Lutnick was attempting to redefine the meaning of the word ‘I,’” said Democratic Rep. James Walkinshaw.
“He claims that when he said, ‘I would never be in a room again with Jeffrey Epstein,’ he meant only him and Jeffrey Epstein,” Walkinshaw told reporters. “Epstein was so gross to him that he wasn’t willing to be in a room with him, but he was perfectly OK with his wife and family being in a room with Epstein. … The American people deserve to see the sweat on his brow as he struggles to answer basic questions about his lies to the American people.”
Democratic Rep. Yassamin Ansari called Lutnick “a pathological liar who is enabling the most egregious coverup in American history.”
“There are real victims here. … and even at the bare minimum, Howard Lutnick was aware of these things. He knew,” she told reporters. “It just demonstrates the culture of enabling these crimes and allowing rich and powerful people like Jeffrey Epstein and all the other rich and disgusting, powerful men to continue.”
This is a developing story
