Democrats on the Senate Appropriations Committee sharply questioned Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on Tuesday about his ties to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, prompting the secretary to acknowledge he’d traveled to the convicted sex offender’s private island years after he’d previously claimed to have cut ties.
Senator Christopher Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, opened a hearing on broadband policy by questioning Mr. Lutnick about Mr. Epstein and accusing the secretary of misrepresenting the extent of his contact with the convicted sex offender, saying his prior claims were “at best highly misleading.”
The inconsistencies of Mr. Lutnick’s accounts called into question his fitness for office and statements to Congress, Mr. Van Hollen added.
Mr. Lutnick defended himself, saying he had “nothing to hide” and insisting he had only limited interactions with Mr. Epstein over the years.
At the heart of the questions was a podcast interview from October in which Mr. Lutnick said that he had decided not to associate with Mr. Epstein in 2005, after Mr. Epstein alluded to his sexual encounters with women while giving Mr. Lutnick and his wife a tour of his house. “My wife and I decided that I will never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again,” Mr. Lutnick said. “So I was never in the room with him socially, for business or even philanthropy.”
But on Tuesday, Mr. Lutnick admitted to senators that he not only met with Mr. Epstein after that encounter but that he and his family visited Mr. Epstein on his private Caribbean island, Little St. James.
Mr. Lutnick confirmed that he traveled to the island in 2012 with his wife, children and “nannies” for a lunch with Mr. Epstein. The visit took place four years after Mr. Epstein had pleaded guilty in Florida to soliciting prostitution from a minor as part of a plea bargain with federal prosecutors.
The correspondence between the two men and the visit to the island came to light in the Justice Department’s recently released files from the investigation of Mr. Epstein.
The files also contain documents showing that Mr. Epstein expressed an interest in meeting Mr. Lutnick’s nanny. Mr. Lutnick said Tuesday that he did not know if the nanny had met Mr. Epstein, adding that he “had no idea what that was about.”
At one point in the hearing, Mr. Lutnick said he first got to know Mr. Epstein when they became neighbors in Manhattan in 2005 but they met only twice over the next 14 years that he could recall.
“I did not have anything you could call a relationship, anything you could call an acquaintance,” Mr. Lutnick said. “I literally met him three times over 14 years. I know and my wife knows that I have done absolutely nothing wrong in any possible regard.”
He added, “I have nothing to hide, absolutely nothing.”
Michael Rothfeld contributed reporting.
Ana Swanson covers trade and international economics for The Times and is based in Washington. She has been a journalist for more than a decade.
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