US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has admitted to visiting the island of Jeffrey Epstein, the former financier convicted of sex crimes.
He stated that he and his family had lunch with Epstein on the financier’s island in 2012, while insisting that there was no relationship between them.
“I had lunch with him after I was on a boat on a family vacation. My wife was with me, as were my four children and the nanny,” he said on Capitol Hill.
“We had lunch on the island, that’s true, for an hour, and we all left, my children with their nannies and my wife… I don’t remember why we did it,” he added.
Lutnick denied that he and Epstein, who met while living next door in New York, had any deeper connections.
“Out of these millions and millions of documents, there might be about 10 emails that link me to him… over a 14-year period,” Lutnick told senators.
“I had no relationship with him. I had very little to do with that person,” Lutnick stated.
In an interview last year, Lutnick said that after a 2005 encounter at Epstein’s home, he felt uncomfortable and vowed to “never be in the same room with that disgusting person again.”
Lutnick said he saw a massage table in the middle of the house and that Epstein told him he got massages “every day.”
“And then he, so to speak, strangely approaches me and says ‘and the right kind of massage’.”
Lutnick added that after that incident, “I was never in the same room with him again, whether it was for social, business or philanthropic purposes. If he was there, I wouldn’t go, because he’s a slanderer.”
“The point here is that he has completely misled the American public, the survivors and Congress,” said Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, referring to Lutnick’s previous claim that the 2005 meeting had made him see Epstein as a “disgusting man” and that it “clearly left the country with the impression that he had no further contact with Jeffrey Epstein.”
