A growing number of US lawmakers are calling on commerce secretary Howard Lutnick to resign from Donald Trump’s cabinet over his links to Jeffrey Epstein.
Adam Schiff, the Democratic senator from California, on Monday said Lutnick had “lied to the American people” about his connections to the deceased child sex offender.
“Lutnick’s lies about his business dealings with a convicted child sex offender raise serious concerns about his judgment and ethics,” Schiff said. “Lutnick has no business being our commerce secretary, and he should resign immediately.”
Lutnick was chief executive of Cantor Fitzgerald, the financial services firm, for almost three decades, until he joined the US president’s cabinet as commerce secretary last year.
A former Democrat, he was among the biggest donors to Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign and co-chaired his transition team. The two men have known each other socially for decades.
But Lutnick has come under mounting political pressure in recent weeks after files released by the US Department of Justice contradicted his earlier claims that he had cut ties with Epstein more than two decades ago.
“He should just resign,” Kentucky Republican congressman Thomas Massie told CNN on Sunday. “[Lutnick has] got a lot to answer for, but really, he should make life easier on the president, frankly, and just resign.”
Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the House oversight committee, added to the calls for Lutnick to step down, writing on X that he had “been lying about his relationship with Epstein”.
“He said he had no interactions with Epstein after 2005, yet we now know they were in business together,” Garcia said. “Lutnick must resign or be fired.”
The White House appeared to defend Lutnick on Monday. “President Trump has assembled the best and most transformative cabinet in modern history. The entire Trump administration, including secretary Lutnick and the Department of Commerce, remains focused on delivering for the American people,” said spokesperson Kush Desai.
In an interview last year, Lutnick described a 2005 encounter with Epstein, who at the time was his neighbour on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. He said he cut ties with the financier shortly after Epstein showed him a room with a massage table.
“My wife and I decided that I will never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again,” Lutnick told The New York Post. “I was never in the room with him socially, for business or even philanthropy. If that guy was there, I wasn’t going, because he’s gross.”
But documents released by the justice department last month contradicted Lutnick’s account, suggesting the men remained in contact over the years. Emails show them making social plans in New York and the Virgin Islands and, in at least one occasion, becoming joint investors in a private company. They also corresponded over neighbourhood issues, seeking to fight a planning application across their street in 2018.
In one 2011 email, Epstein’s assistant noted a planned drinks appointment with Lutnick.
Other emails from December 2012 show Lutnick making plans to meet Epstein for lunch in Little Saint James, Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean. Days later, Epstein’s assistant sent Lutnick an email, saying she was passing along a message from Epstein: “Nice seeing you.”
A stock purchase agreement from late 2012 showed the two men signed the document for separate entities to acquire stakes in Adfin, a defunct advertising technology company.
Lutnick also sent Epstein an email in May 2018 about a proposed building project in their neighbourhood.
Melanie Stansbury, another Democratic member of the House oversight committee, on Monday called for Lutnick to testify before the panel, which last year stepped up its investigation into the government’s handling of the Epstein case.
“The committee is keeping an ongoing list of individuals we would like to subpoena,” Stansbury told reporters. “Of course we would like to speak to Secretary Lutnick, and I personally believe that Mr Lutnick needs to step down immediately.”
James Comer, the Republican chair of the oversight committee, was separately asked by reporters on Monday whether Lutnick should testify before Congress.
Comer did not rule out subpoenaing the commerce secretary, saying: “We have got a lot of very important people we are trying to bring in to answer questions . . . We are interested in talking to anyone that might have any information that would help us get justice for the survivors.”
The commerce department said the calls for Lutnick to step down were “nothing more than a failing attempt by the legacy media to distract from the administration’s accomplishments including securing trillions of dollars in investment, delivering historic trade deals and fighting for the American worker”.
It added: “Mr and Mrs Lutnick met Jeffrey Epstein in 2005 and had very limited interactions with him over the next 14 years.”
Comer spoke to reporters after Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s co-conspirator who is serving a 20-year prison sentence, briefly appeared before the committee.
Maxwell invoked the fifth amendment of the US constitution, which protects individuals from self-incrimination, and refused to answer lawmakers’ questions.
Comer said Maxwell’s attorney told the committee she would answer questions if she were granted clemency by Trump.
Maxwell is a “very bad person”, Comer said, adding he “personally” did not think she “should be granted any type of immunity or clemency”.
However, Trump — who has pardoned a number of people convicted of white-collar crimes — has not ruled out pardoning Maxwell. Asked by a reporter in November about the possibility of clemency for the convicted sex offender, the president replied: “I haven’t thought about it for months. Maybe I haven’t thought about it all . . . I don’t rule it in or out, I don’t even think about it.”
Additional reporting by Peter Andringa in London