Revelations about ties to Jeffrey Epstein have toppled leaders of corporate America, Hollywood and academia as the Justice Department has released millions of documents and images from the disgraced financier’s files in recent months. But the Trump administration has steadfastly repelled such fallout, dismissing any associations that top officials had with the sex offender as trivial.
The White House’s fortress mentality was mobilized last week after Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, acknowledged that he traveled to Mr. Epstein’s private island and had another encounter with him years after Mr. Lutnick claimed to have cut ties with him.
Such associations have led to the resignations of business leaders, but President Trump’s White House was unfazed. The stark contrast underscores the murky nature of who is deemed to be complicit and who is not when it comes to Mr. Epstein, and the Trump administration’s ability to repel even the most harsh public scrutiny. Despite bipartisan calls for Mr. Lutnick’s resignation, the White House dismissed concerns about his character and credibility.
“Secretary Lutnick remains a very important member of President Trump’s team and the president fully supports the secretary,” Karoline Leavitt, White House press secretary, said last week.
Mr. Lutnick’s comments during Senate testimony contradicted his assertion on a podcast last year that he had been so disgusted by Mr. Epstein during a 2005 visit to his townhouse that Mr. Lutnick never set foot in a room with Mr. Epstein again.
Mr. Lutnick’s name appeared in more than 250 documents in the Epstein files released by the Justice Department, a review by The New York Times found. He said that he first met Mr. Epstein when they became neighbors in Manhattan in 2005, but that they met only twice more over the next 14 years that he could recall.
However, at the Senate hearing Mr. Lutnick confirmed that he and his family traveled to the island in 2012 for a lunch with Mr. Epstein during a family vacation aboard his yacht with his wife, children, nannies and another family. 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.
Mr. Lutnick is not the only prominent Trump administration official who has appeared in the Epstein documents. The records showed that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, once went hunting for dinosaur fossils with Mr. Epstein. An email in the files showed that Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, invited Mr. Epstein to a 2016 Valentine’s Day party.
The Trump administration’s muted response is a striking departure from that of corporate America.
Thomas J. Pritzker, a billionaire heir to the Hyatt Hotels fortune, stepped down from his role Monday as executive chairman of the Hyatt Hotels Corporation. Last week, Casey Wasserman, a Los Angeles entertainment executive and chair of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics whose name recently surfaced in the Epstein files, said he has started the process of selling the talent agency he founded more than two decades ago.
And last year, Harvard started a new review of ties that its former president, Lawrence H. Summers, and others at the institution had with Mr. Epstein. After the release of emails between Mr. Summers and Mr. Epstein last November, Mr. Summers said that he would step back from public commitments.
“Corporate America, they answer to a board,” said Gene Grabowski, a Washington-based crisis communications expert. “Tump doesn’t answer to a board.”
Mr. Grabowski added: “The closest thing he has is the voters, and he either doesn’t want to believe the polls or thinks he can reverse them.”
A poll conducted last month by The New York Times and Siena University showed that Mr. Trump’s lowest approval rating within the Republican Party came on his handling of the release of files related to Mr. Epstein: Only 53 percent of Republicans approved of his handling of that matter.
Mr. Lutnick’s ties to Mr. Epstein pale compared with those of Mr. Trump, who socialized regularly with Mr. Epstein in the 1990s and 2000s.
Using a proprietary search tool, The New York Times identified more than 5,300 files containing more than 38,000 references to Mr. Trump, his wife, his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, and other related words and phrases in the latest batch of emails, government files, videos and other records released by the Justice Department.
Mr. Trump has downplayed his association with Mr. Epstein and accused Democrats of concocting conspiracy theories about their friendship. The president said last summer that he had ended his relationship with the financier because he had “hired away” spa attendants at Mar-a-Lago.
In defending Mr. Lutnick, the White House is once again pushing the boundaries of its ability to weather a controversy that might have hobbled other administrations.
“This administration has placed all its chips on the idea that the public will eventually tire of controversy, and now they’re betting that even allegations tied to pedophilia fall into that same bucket,” said Alexandra LaManna, who served as a spokeswoman in the Biden administration. “That’s a category of accusation that, historically, has been politically and morally radioactive.”
Noting that Mr. Lutnick vacationed on Mr. Epstein’s island, she added: “It’s hard to imagine any president other than Trump trying to shrug that off.”
Alan Rappeport is an economic policy reporter for The Times, based in Washington. He covers the Treasury Department and writes about taxes, trade and fiscal matters.
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