Howard Lutnick spent four hours answering questions from congressional investigators this week after a 2012 photo surfaced showing him with Jeffrey Epstein on the financier’s private island. The commerce secretary acknowledged that he briefly visited the island with his family and said the trip came after he and his wife decided Epstein was someone they should avoid.
House Oversight Committee investigators pressed him because the photo raised a direct question about what he had said for years. Lutnick had initially denied any contact with Epstein after 2005, but emails later confirmed the 2012 island visit, forcing him to explain a relationship he now says never amounted to friendship.
The central weight of the deposition was not just the visit itself but the way Lutnick described the distance between himself and Epstein. He said he and Allison Lutnick had an informal conversation when they first met Epstein and agreed they would never establish a relationship with him. In his account, they concluded Epstein was “inappropriate and gross,” language Lutnick repeated in substance more than once as he tried to frame the matter as one of judgment, not intimacy. He also referenced his wife at least 50 times during the deposition, making her the anchor of his explanation.
That explanation is in some tension with the paper trail. Allison Lutnick wrote to Lesley Groff, Epstein’s personal assistant, that the family was looking forward to visiting, would be coming from Caneel Bay in the morning and would “love to join you for lunch.” She described the group as two families with four children each, ranging in age from 7 to 16, with six boys and two girls, and added, “I hope that’s okay.”
The visit also carries added weight because it came eight years after the Lutnicks said they had agreed to avoid Epstein and four years after Epstein registered in New York as a sex offender for soliciting an underage prostitute. The timeline matters because it places a family trip to Epstein’s island in a period when his conduct was already public and when, as documents tied to the Epstein Files Transparency Act show, he was still actively expanding his trafficking empire.
Lutnick told investigators that his memory was jogged only after the photograph became public. He said he had no meaningful contact with Epstein after 2005 and that the last communication he recalled was a 2018 correspondence included in the Epstein Files. That leaves a narrower question than the one that opened the inquiry: not whether he and Epstein knew each other, but how a visit that was later confirmed by emails could be squared with years of denials.
For Lutnick, the answer now is public and unmistakable. He says the island trip happened, says it was brief and family-oriented, and says it ended the way he and his wife had planned years earlier — with Epstein avoided, not embraced.
