New York: US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick admitted that he and his family had lunch with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein on the latter’s private island in 2012.
“I did have lunch with him, as I was on a boat going across on a family vacation,” Lutnick said during a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing on Tuesday. “And we had lunch on the island, that is true, for an hour.”
“I did not have any relationship with him. I barely had anything to do with that person,” he said in his testimony.
Lutnick had previously said that he cut off contact with Epstein in 2005. But the latest Epstein files released by the US Department of Justice in January showed that he and Epstein remained in touch years later. And the two men also had business dealings as recently as 2014, local media reported.
Lutnick is now under pressure from both Democrats and some Republicans to resign, Xinhua news agency reported.
Epstein pleaded guilty to a state charge of soliciting a minor for prostitution in 2008. He was arrested again in July 2019 on federal sex trafficking charges and died by suicide in jail on Aug. 10, 2019, before trial.
Earlier in January, the US Justice Department began releasing millions of records linked to the investigations and prosecutions of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, saying it had completed an unprecedented review ordered under a new transparency law signed by President Donald Trump.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told reporters that the department was producing more than three million pages of material, including over 2,000 videos and about 180,000 images, as part of its compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed into law on November 19, 2025.
“In total, that means that the department produced approximately 3.5 million pages in compliance with the act,” Blanche said at a news conference at the Justice Department.
Blanche said the review effort involved more than 500 lawyers and professionals across multiple divisions, including the FBI and several US attorney’s offices. He said teams met “twice daily, sometimes more,” for nearly 75 days to complete the work.
(IANS)
