U.S. Commerce Secretary Confirms He Visited Epstein's Island Years After He Said He’d Cut Ties

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick confirmed on Tuesday that he and his family visited the private island of the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in 2012, despite Lutnick previously saying that he had cut ties with Epstein years earlier. “My wife was with me, as were my four children and nannies. I had another couple. They were there as well with their children, and we had lunch on the island,” Lutnick said during a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing. He said that he and his family were on vacation and only spent about an hour on the island before leaving.  Lutnick’s comments come as lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have called for his resignation after the Justice Department’s latest release of records related to Epstein revealed that the Commerce Secretary’s relationship with the disgraced financier was more extensive than he had let on. Lutnick said on Tuesday that he had searched for his name in the files made public by the Justice Department and that there were “probably about 10 emails” that connected him to Epstein, among the more than three million pages in the latest release. “I didn’t look through the documents with any fear whatsoever, because I know and my wife knows that I have done absolutely nothing wrong in any possible regard,” he said at the hearing. “I did not have any relationship with him. I barely had anything to do with that person. Okay?” Lutnick said. In response to a line of questioning from Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, Lutnick said, “I have nothing to hide. Absolutely nothing.” Read more: Bipartisan Lawmakers Call for Trump’s Commerce Secretary to Step Down—or Be Ousted—Over Epstein Ties The Commerce Secretary, who was once Epstein’s neighbor on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, said during an interview on the “Pod Force One” podcast last year that he “was never in the room” with Epstein “socially, for business or even philanthropy” following a visit to the financier’s townhouse in 2005 that led Lutnick to find him “disgusting.” The files released by the Justice Department late last month, however, contained communications between Lutnick and Epstein spanning the course of at least 13 years, according to a New York Times analysis. Multiple of the exchanges between the two men or their assistants indicated that Epstein and Lutnick socialized together in both New York and on Epstein’s Caribbean Island years after Lutnick said he severed ties with the financier in 2005, and after Epstein was convicted of soliciting prostitution involving a minor in 2008. “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,” Van Hollen said to Lutnick on Tuesday. The Commerce Secretary also faced questioning over his connection to Epstein from Democratic Sens. Chris Coons of Delaware and Jeff Merkley of Oregon. None of the Senators accused Lutnick of wrongdoing, but they pushed for greater transparency on his relationship to the late sex offender. Merkley urged Lutnick to “be completely frank and open with everyone” and “correct the record as needed” as he laid out several documents among those made public by the Justice Department that showed Lutnick interacting with Epstein after 2005.  Emails included in the latest release of the files appear to show Lutnick planning a visit to Epstein’s island, Little St. James, near St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands in December 2012.  Additional exchanges show that the visit marked one of a number of interactions between Lutnick and Epstein over the years, indicating that the two planned to meet for drinks in May 2011 and that Lutnick invited Epstein to a “very =ntimate fundraising event with Hilary Clinton” in November 2015, among other apparent personal and professional dealings. Read more: Trump Officials Redacted Epstein Files to Protect ‘Prominent’ Individuals, Lawmakers Allege Following reports on the communications between Lutnick and Epstein in the released files, several lawmakers called on the Commerce Secretary to step down, including Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who co-authored the law that mandated the release of all the government’s files related to Epstein; Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff of California; and Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia, also of California.  “Really, he should make life easier on the President, frankly, and just resign,” Massie told CNN’s “Inside Politics” on Sunday. “Secretary Howard Lutnick lied to the country about his ties to Epstein. Now we learned that they were in business together. He has no business being our Commerce Secretary. He should resign,” Schiff wrote on X the following day.  Garcia took it a step further, calling for Lutnick to be fired if he did not resign.  In a statement to TIME on Monday, a Commerce Department spokesperson said, “This is nothing more than a failing attempt by the legacy media to distract from the administration’s accomplishments including securing Trillions of dollars in investment, delivering historic trade deals and fighting for the American worker. Mr. and Mrs. Lutnick met Jeffrey Epstein in 2005 and had very limited interactions with him over the next 14 years.”