Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick revealed an uncomfortable encounter he had decades ago with late disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
Lutnick, who was neighbors with the convicted sex offender, told host Miranda Devine in an episode of “Pod Force One,” released Wednesday, that after rebuilding and moving into his house in 2005, Epstein’s “assistant” had knocked on his door and invited him for coffee.
“My wife and I go next door. We walk seven steps to the next house for coffee. And we share a wall, it’s New York City,” Lutnick said.
Lutnick said Epstein asked if he wanted a tour, to which he responded, “Great!”
“His house is like super big, really wide. So he gives me a tour in the living room, big living room. And then across from it is double doors, I assume it’s the dining room,” Lutnick said.
“There’s a massage table in the middle of the room, and candles all around and stuff. So I ask very insightful, cutting questions. I say to him, ‘Massage table in the middle of your house? How often do you have a massage?’” he added.
Lutnick said that Epstein responded with “every day.”
“And then he like gets like weirdly close to me, and he says, ‘And the right kind of massage,’” Lutnick said, before adding: “Now my wife is standing here, so she looks at me, and I look at her, and we say, ‘I’m sorry, we have to go.’”
Lutnick emphasized that he and his wife decided that they will “never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again.”
“So I was never in the room with him socially, for business or even philanthropy,” Lutnick said. “If that guy was there, I wasn’t going, cause he’s gross. And so I look back at it as a gift.”
The story comes as the Epstein case continues to shake the political world. A discharge petition — aimed at forcing a House vote on ultimately compelling the Justice Department to release files related to his investigation — is just one signature short of passing the required threshold. Meanwhile, the DOJ has began turning over records from the Epstein investigation to the House Oversight Committee, including a birthday letter sent to Epstein that included Trump’s name and alleged signature.
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that President Donald Trump has questioned how uproar from his administration’s handling of the documents could die down. The case initially returned to the national spotlight after the DOJ and FBI released a memo in July, which concluded that Epstein did not keep a “client list” of public figures. It also confirmed that he had died by suicide while awaiting his trial in 2019.
At the time, the DOJ said it would not be releasing further information, prompting outrage from some of Trump’s most staunch loyalists and Democrats following years of speculation and conspiracy theories from even some officials now in the Trump administration.