Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, agreed on Tuesday to sit for an interview with the House Oversight Committee about his relationship with the sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein.
Mr. Lutnick, a billionaire businessman, lived next door to Mr. Epstein in New York. Until recently, he had claimed to have cut ties with Mr. Epstein in 2005, after he made a visit to the Manhattan townhouse where the authorities said Mr. Epstein engaged in sexual acts with underage girls.
But after Congress passed a law requiring the Justice Department to disclose its investigative material on Mr. Epstein, the department released documents showing that Mr. Lutnick and Mr. Epstein continued to communicate and socialize for years after Mr. Epstein had been convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor. Mr. Lutnick later acknowledged in a Senate hearing that he had visited Mr. Epstein’s private island in 2012.
The revelation that Mr. Lutnick had lied about the extent and timeline of his ties to Mr. Epstein prompted calls for his resignation from Democrats and Republicans, making him one of the highest-profile political figures in the country to come under scrutiny after the release of the files.
Mr. Lutnick has not been accused of any wrongdoing in connection with Mr. Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation. The White House has closed ranks behind him, saying that President Trump remains fully supportive of him.
But Democrats and Republicans on the Oversight Committee said last week that they planned to push for Mr. Lutnick to testify, arguing that there were questions about his credibility. His testimony would take place behind closed doors, with the transcript to be released afterward.
Members of the committee had privately been weighing a move to force the panel’s Republican chairman, Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, to issue a subpoena, according to people familiar with their conversations who were not authorized to discuss them publicly.
Instead, the commerce secretary beat them to the punch.
In a statement, Mr. Comer said that Mr. Lutnick had “proactively agreed to appear voluntarily” for an interview. “I look forward to his testimony,” Mr. Comer said.
A date has not been set for the interview, which was reported earlier by Axios.
Democrats in particular have been eager to question Mr. Lutnick after it was revealed that he misrepresented his relationship with Mr. Epstein. The secretary said last year on a podcast that he and his wife 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. The documents revealed that Mr. Lutnick and Mr. Epstein had been in contact over the years, including a 2012 email in which Mr. Lutnick raised the possibility of visiting Little St. James, Mr. Epstein’s private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
At the Senate hearing last month, Mr. Lutnick said that he and his family traveled to the island in 2012 for lunch. He described the trip as a stop during a family vacation he was taking aboard his yacht with his wife, children, nannies and another family.
But Mr. Lutnick reiterated that he did not have a meaningful friendship with Mr. Epstein.
“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.”
Michael Gold covers Congress for The Times, with a focus on immigration policy and congressional oversight.
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