Howard Lutnick, President Trump’s commerce secretary, was grilled by lawmakers for several hours on Wednesday over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender, after documents released by the Justice Department revealed that Mr. Lutnick had misrepresented his relationship with Mr. Epstein.
During a closed-door interview, members of the House Oversight Committee pressed Mr. Lutnick on the extent of his relationship with Mr. Epstein. The commerce secretary’s name appeared in more than 250 documents in the Epstein files, a review by The New York Times found.
Mr. Lutnick is one of the highest-profile cabinet members to come under scrutiny in connection with Mr. Epstein. The commerce secretary, who previously ran a large Wall Street brokerage firm, lived next door to Mr. Epstein on the Upper East Side of Manhattan for more than a decade. Until recently, Mr. Lutnick had claimed to have not been in the same room with Mr. Epstein after an encounter in 2005. But documents released by the Justice Department earlier this year showed that Mr. Lutnick had traveled to Mr. Epstein’s private island in 2012.
According to two people familiar with his testimony, Mr. Lutnick said in his opening statement that he had met Mr. Epstein only three times: once for coffee and a tour of Mr. Epstein’s home in New York after they became neighbors; once when Mr. Lutnick and his family were invited to Mr. Epstein’s island in 2012; and once to discuss a construction project on Mr. Epstein’s home in New York that might have had an impact on Mr. Lutnick’s residence.
After hours of questioning, Democrats told reporters that Mr. Lutnick did not admit to misleading Americans about his ties to Mr. Epstein, including when he said on a podcast last year that he was never in the room with Mr. Epstein again after their first meeting.
Speaking with reporters in the hallway outside the closed session, Representative Yassamin Ansari, Democrat of Arizona, said that Mr. Lutnick repeatedly characterized their interactions as “meaningless and inconsequential.”
But Ms. Ansari said that she was not satisfied with Mr. Lutnick’s explanation about why he visited Mr. Epstein’s island, particularly years after their first interaction, which Mr. Lutnick said made him and his wife uncomfortable. She added that the secretary himself called the visit “inexplicable.”
Before Mr. Lutnick’s interview, Representative James R. Comer, Republican of Kentucky and the committee’s chairman, acknowledged that Mr. Lutnick “wasn’t 100 percent truthful” about whether or not he had been on the island.
After Republicans finished questioning Mr. Lutnick, Mr. Comer said that he was satisfied that Mr. Lutnick was being “forthcoming” about his interactions with Mr. Epstein. But he did not directly answer a question about whether Mr. Lutnick explained the discrepancy in his accounts.
The documents released by the Justice Department suggested that Mr. Lutnick had another encounter with Mr. Epstein at his house in 2011, years after Mr. Lutnick claimed to have cut ties with him. The records also indicated that the men invested in the same privately held company together and dealt with each other on neighborhood and philanthropic issues.
Mr. Epstein, who was convicted in Florida in 2008 of soliciting prostitution from a minor, died in a Manhattan jail in 2019 while being held on federal sex-trafficking charges.
Mr. Lutnick has received questions from lawmakers about his connections with Mr. Epstein in congressional hearings on other topics, first in February and again last month.
All Democrats and some Republicans on the Oversight Committee had signaled that they would try to force a vote on a subpoena for Mr. Lutnick. But Mr. Comer said that Mr. Lutnick had volunteered to testify.
The Commerce Department said in a statement on Wednesday before the session that Mr. Lutnick looked forward to “putting to rest the inaccurate and baseless claims in the media.”
Though the committee’s investigation into Mr. Epstein and the Justice Department’s handling of the case against him has sprawled to include a number of political figures, Mr. Lutnick is the first current Trump administration official to testify before the panel. The committee is expected to release a transcript of his interview, but it was not recorded on video, a decision that Democrats criticized.
Mr. Comer contended that Democrats were overly focused on logistics rather than substance, and he criticized the panel’s top Democrat, Representative Robert Garcia of California, for missing Mr. Lutnick’s testimony. A spokeswoman said that Mr. Garcia had a scheduling conflict.
The committee also issued a subpoena to Pam Bondi before Mr. Trump fired her as attorney general last month. She is scheduled to appear on May 29.
The files also showed that Mr. Epstein expressed an interest in meeting Mr. Lutnick’s former nanny in 2013 and had her résumé sent to him. It is not clear whether they ever met.
Mr. Lutnick said in February that he did not know whether the nanny had met Mr. Epstein, or if she was one of the nannies Mr. Lutnick had taken to the island. Mr. Lutnick has four children.
In October, Mr. Lutnick said in a podcast interview that he had decided after a 2005 incident not to associate with Mr. Epstein, 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 on the podcast, “Pod Force One.” “So I was never in the room with him socially, for business or even philanthropy.”
But in a congressional hearing in February, Mr. Lutnick told lawmakers that he not only met with Mr. Epstein after that encounter, but that he and his family also traveled to his private Caribbean island, Little St. James, in 2012 for lunch. Mr. Lutnick was traveling aboard his yacht and accompanied by 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.
Michael Gold covers Congress for The Times, with a focus on immigration policy and congressional oversight.
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