WASHINGTON — Howard Lutnick, President Donald Trump’s commerce secretary, faced questions Wednesday in a closed-door session of the House Oversight Committee over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender.
Lutnick is one of the highest-profile Cabinet members to come under scrutiny in connection with Epstein. The commerce secretary’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.
Asked whether Lutnick’s credibility had been undermined, Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., who chairs the House Oversight Committee, said Wednesday: “We’re going to ask him all these questions, and we’ll let the American people judge whether the credibility was damaged or not at the end of the day.”
Comer said that Lutnick “wasn’t 100% truthful with whether he or not he had been on the island.”
He added that it was the first time in the last decade that a chair of the oversight committee had brought in a Cabinet secretary of his own party.
During the hearing, Lutnick downplayed his ties to Epstein, claiming their relationship was inconsequential, according to two people familiar with his testimony.
Lutnick lived next door to Epstein on the Upper East Side of Manhattan for over a decade. Until recently, he had claimed to have not been in the same room with Epstein after an encounter in 2005. But millions of documents that were released by the Justice Department earlier this year showed that Lutnick had traveled to Epstein’s private island in 2012.
The documents suggest Lutnick had another encounter with Epstein at his house in 2011, years after 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.
Epstein, who was convicted in Florida in 2008 of soliciting prostitution from a minor, died in a New York City jail in 2019 while being held on federal sex-trafficking charges.
Lutnick has received questions from lawmakers about his connections with Epstein in congressional hearings on other topics, first in February and again last month.
All Democrats and some Republicans on the Oversight Committee signaled that they would try to force a vote on a subpoena for Lutnick. But Comer said that Lutnick had volunteered to testify.
The Commerce Department said in a statement Wednesday that Lutnick looked forward to “putting to rest the inaccurate and baseless claims in the media.”
Though the committee’s investigation into Epstein and the Justice Department’s handling of the case against him has sprawled to include a number of political figures, Lutnick is the first current Trump administration official to testify before the panel.
The committee also issued a subpoena to Pam Bondi, the former attorney general who Trump fired last month, before she was dismissed from her position. She has not yet appeared for a deposition.
Questions by lawmakers in the closed-door session Wednesday could touch on Lutnick’s former nanny. The files showed that Epstein expressed an interest in meeting the nanny in 2013 and had her resume sent to him. It is not clear if they ever met.
Lutnick said in February that he did not know if the nanny had met Epstein or if she was one of the nannies Lutnick had brought to the island. Lutnick has four children.
In October, Lutnick said in a podcast interview that he had decided after a 2005 incident not to associate with Epstein, after Epstein alluded to his sexual encounters with women while giving 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,” 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, Lutnick told lawmakers that he not only met with Epstein after that encounter but that he and his family also traveled to his private Caribbean island, Little St. James, in 2012 for lunch. Lutnick was traveling aboard his yacht and accompanied by his wife, children, nannies and another family.
The visit took place four years after Epstein had pleaded guilty in Florida to soliciting prostitution from a minor as part of a plea bargain with federal prosecutors.
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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
By Ana Swanson and Michael Gold/Tierney L. Cross
c. 2026 The New York Times Company
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