Dems demand Lutnick resign over Epstein interview: ‘You lied’

Lutnick testified before the House Oversight Committee behind closed doors on May 6. He told the committee that he was participating voluntarily, though he had agreed to appear after Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., said she would issue a bipartisan subpoena to compel his testimony.

A transcription of the interview shows Lutnick saying he could recall meeting with Epstein three times, including the 2005 and 2012 interactions.

In 2011, Lutnick said, Epstein’s staff reached out “suggesting he had a reason to get in touch with me.” It was arranged that Lutnick, while walking with his wife and dogs on a Sunday afternoon, would ring Epstein’s doorbell “to hear what he had to say,” the secretary said.

“My best recollection is: I rang the bell, sat in his foyer with my dog, waited for him to come down, heard what he had to say, and left. As far as I recall, it was about scaffolding. It was meaningless and inconsequential,” he told the committee.

Under questioning, Lutnick denied that he had been misleading about his relationship with Epstein, insisting that his use of the word “I” versus “we” was a crucial distinction.

“I was accurate. I think I described it accurately. I don’t want it to be modified in any way. It was I would not be in the room with him socially, which I was not; for business, which I was not; or philanthropic, which I was not. So I believe that what I said was accurate. I believe what I said was accurate when I said it, and I believe it now. So I didn’t say ‘we’ would never. I said ‘I’ would never,” he said.

A questioner replied, “We all understand that you were in the room with him in a social setting, but you have insisted that this sentence is accurate. So I just — that does not make sense on its face.”

Lutnick later said, “I was never with him, meaning, I was never in a situation with him. I was with my wife. And they were meaningless and inconsequential. But contextually, so people would understand, I was never with him in any other manner. I, Howard Lutnick, one person, was never in a situation. So you couldn’t take it out of context. I was never with him.”

The Democrats wrote Thursday, “No reasonable person would accept this account.”

“A cabinet secretary’s most basic obligation to Congress is candor; your statements have a bearing on the lives of all Americans. You used a congressional interview not to correct the record, but to perpetuate a false public narrative,” they wrote.

“You contradicted prior statements and stonewalled on basic questions. A secretary who will parse the meaning of plain English to avoid acknowledging his own words, claim no recollection of a documented visit to a convicted sex offender’s private island, and refuse to answer basic questions about his conversations with the President cannot be trusted to serve as a leader in the federal government.”

“We therefore call on you to resign immediately as secretary of Commerce,” they wrote.

Article source: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/14/howard-lutnick-jeffrey-epstein-commerce-trump.html