Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick admitted that he went on vacation, with his family, to Jeffrey Epstein’s private island in 2012. How very White Lotus! Suddenly, every ear in Washington cocked Lutnick’s way, like he was starring in an old E.F. Hutton commercial.
“My wife was with me, as were my four children and nannies. 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.”
Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland gave America this early Valentine’s Day present during a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee session on broadband funding – what was supposed to be a dull parliamentary proceeding along the lines of the hundreds that occur in DC every day. “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,” Van Hollen said.
Even in the hearing, Lutnick said that he initially met Epstein when they moved in next door to each other in 2005, and then they met after that only two times until 2019, when Epstein did or didn’t kill himself in jail. Lutnick says, sure, there was a lunch, and a drinks planned. But Senator Jeff Merkley, sensing some blood in the Caribbean, noted that the Epstein files indicate at least eight such meetings. “You were planning a trip to the private island with your family. That sounds like somebody you know well enough to call up and say, ‘Let’s get our families together, let’s visit each other.’”
This runs counter to Lutnick’s Epstein narrative. Last year, appearing on Pod Force One with Fox News contributor Miranda Devine, Lutnick admitted that Epstein was his neighbor for 10 years on East 71st Street in Manhattan. When Lutnick bought his house, it was “pigeons and mice,” he said. Was there also a panic room?
Epstein’s assistant knocked on the door, Lutnick said, and said that Mr. Epstein would like to have them over for coffee. “We walk seven steps,” Lutnick said. “It’s New York. We share a wall.” They had their coffee, and Epstein offered them a tour.
Through double doors, past the living room, was another room, with a massage table in the middle of the room, with candles all around. Perhaps Sting was about to film a music video there. “So I ask very insightful, cutting questions,” Lutnick said. “I say, ‘massage table, in the middle of your house? How often do you have a massage?’ And he says ‘every day.’ And he gets weirdly close to me and he says, ‘and the right kind of massage.’”
That’s one degree away from “having an old friend for dinner, Clarice.” Lutnick and his wife left, and, “in the six to eight steps it takes to get from his house to my house, my wife and I decided that I will never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again.”
It’s a fine story that has surely made good dinner-party (and podcast fodder) over the years, except that it’s quite obvious that Lutnick was in the room with that disgusting person again, at least somewhat often. The Epstein files, as it turns out, have been less about revealing about who participated in an elite pedophilia ring, and more about revealing the social incestuousness of a certain segment of upper Manhattan high society, a 21st-century gilded age.
When asked about certain names, including Lutnick’s, in the new release of the Epstein files, President Trump said, “I didn’t… I’m sure they’re fine. Otherwise, there would have been major headlines.” Well, the headlines are here, and they’re pretty major.
Comments