On Tuesday, Howard Lutnick, former Commerce Secretary under the Trump administration, acknowledged that he and his family had lunch on Jeffrey Epstein’s private island several years ago.
“I did have lunch with him, as I was on a boat going across on a family vacation” in 2012, Lutnick said in testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee, News.Az reports, citing foreign media.
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“My wife was with me, as were my four children and nannies,” he said. “I had another couple with — they were there as well, with their children.”
“And we had lunch on the island, that is true, for an hour,” he said.
“And we left with all of my children, with my nannies and my wife, all together. We were on family vacation,” he said.
The secretary’s admission came as he faces bipartisan calls to resign following the release of records showing that his business and personal relationship with Epstein was more extensive than previously known.
Lutnick previously said that he cut off contact with Epstein after 2005 — years before Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to a state-level charge of soliciting a minor for prostitution, which required him to register as a sex offender.
But analyses of the latest batch of Epstein files released by the Department of Justice show Lutnick and Epstein were in communication years later.
In December 2012, Epstein invited Lutnick to lunch at his private island in the Caribbean for lunch, the documents showed. The two men also had business dealings as recently as 2014, CBS News reported.
In his testimony Tuesday morning, Lutnick insisted that he “barely had anything to do with that person.”
“I’m glad to be here to make it clear that I met Jeffrey Epstein when he moved, when I moved to a house next door to him in New York,” the Cabinet secretary testified.
“Over the next 14 years, I met him two other times that I can recall, two times,” he said. “So six years later, I met him, and then a year and a half after that, I met him, and never again.”
“Probably the total — and you’ve seen all of these documents, of these millions and millions of documents — there may be 10 emails connecting me with him … Over a 14 year period.”
“I did not have any relationship with him,” Lutnick said.
