WASHINGTON — Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told a congressional committee Wednesday that a lunch invitation from convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein on his private Caribbean island was “unsettling” — but that didn’t stop Lutnick from traveling there with his wife and kids in 2012.
One source familiar with Lutnick’s remarks told The Post that the cabinet official “did not know” how an Epstein assistant knew he was traveling through the US Virgin Islands and found that fact “unsettling.”
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Lutnick, 64, told members of the House Oversight Committee in a closed-door, transcribed interview that he only met three times with Epstein — years before he committed suicide while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges in 2019, and at least twice after the financier’s Florida plea deal that forced him to register as a sex offender in 2008.
The commerce secretary, who lived next to Epstein on the Upper East Side from 2005 to 2019, said he didn’t have any “personal” or “professional” relationship with his neighbor and stressed that he never witnessed any inappropriate conduct with young women, according to lawmakers and sources.
But Lutnick backtracked again from his sweeping claims, first made on The Post’s “Pod Force One” podcast in October, that Epstein was “the greatest blackmailer ever” who traded the feds videos of prominent individuals implicated in crimes in exchange for his plea deal a decade before.
He expressed regrets about his comments to Post columnist Miranda Devine, suggested he was merely speculating and claimed it was “inexplicable” even to him why he still met with Epstein in 2011 and 2012 — after he and his wife had a creepy encounter with the pedophile in which Epstein showed them massage tables at his Manhattan penthouse, Democrats on the panel told reporters.
