Lutnick and Epstein - The long version - Extended accounting of their life intersections and narratives related to the two men of extreme wealth. 16 related photos. Sourced.
The House Next Door
Howard Lutnick's account of his next-door neighbor is that he barely knew him.
He gave one version on a podcast on October 1, 2025 (video) — a single tour, a massage table, six or eight steps back to his own door, and never in a room with the man again. He gave a different one under questioning by the House Oversight Committee in May 2026 (transcript), where "never in a room" became three occasions across the years that followed — a tour in 2005, a foyer visit in 2011, lunch on an island in 2012 — each one, he told the members, "meaningless and inconsequential."
The neighbor was Jeffrey Epstein. Lutnick is the 41st Secretary of Commerce of the United States. They lived on opposite sides of the same wall for fourteen years.
The deed
In November 1998, the Comet Trust sold 11 East 71st Street to Howard Lutnick for ten dollars and the assumption of a four-million-dollar mortgage. Lutnick was thirty-seven.
Two and a half years earlier, the same townhouse had been conveyed into the Comet Trust by another trust — the 11 East 71st Street Trust — and Jeffrey Epstein had signed the conveyance personally, as Trustee (Memorandum of Agreement, NY County Reel 2333 Pg 0865, recorded June 13, 1996; on file in NYC ACRIS). Paragraph 1 of the same recorded Memorandum obliged the Comet Trust, before any future sale to a third party, to give Epstein's trust "prior notice" and "the opportunity to acquire the Property." Epstein had, in writing, the right to be the next buyer of his future neighbor's house. In 1998 his trust did not exercise it; the sale to Lutnick went forward.
Epstein was named Trustee of the 11 East 71st Street Trust in 1992 (Crain's New York). He worked under one of the broadest powers of attorney any wealthy American has ever signed away — Leslie Wexner's July 1991 grant, which let him hire and fire on Wexner's behalf, sign checks, buy and sell property, borrow money, and execute legally binding documents at will (ABC News). Epstein routed more than $1.3 billion of Wexner-related stock through personal trusts over the next fifteen years (CNBC).
The house next to 11 East 71st — 9 East 71st, twenty-one thousand square feet, forty rooms, a brass "JE" set into the facade — had passed from Wexner to Epstein's NES LLC for nominal recorded consideration (New York Times). Epstein was using it by the mid-1990s.
What had passed between Epstein and Lutnick before the 1998 closing is not in the public record.
Before the move-in
The renovation of 11 East 71st took seven years. Lutnick's first son, Kyle, was born in 1996, Brandon in 1997, Casey, his daughter, in 2001. The family lived first at Trump Palace, the Trump-branded condominium tower at 200 East 69th Street (Forbes / Dan Alexander), then at 817 Fifth Avenue on a four-month bridge lease, while contractors worked their way through 11 East 71st.
What survives from those seven years is fragmentary: newspaper coverage, a charity register, and one FBI phone call.
On September 14, 2001, three days after Cantor Fitzgerald lost 658 employees in the upper floors of the North Tower, Lutnick announced the Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund and pledged a quarter of the firm's profits for five years to the families of the dead (Forbes). Within days, Cantor stopped paying the missing employees' salaries; at the end of the month, the families were told their health benefits would end (ABC News, 2001). Only after the public reaction did Lutnick commit to ten years of health coverage. The fund's UK arm was registered with the Charity Commission as Number 1088683 (register entry).
Two summers later, on July 19 and 20, 2003, the La Dolce Vita gala was held at Stowe School in Buckinghamshire. The proceeds went to two charities: CancerBackup and the Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund. Among the guests, photographed on the school's lawn by Getty Images, was Ghislaine Maxwell (Getty Images).
Stowe will come back into this story.
That same year, Maxwell had been assembling something else. Epstein turned fifty on January 20, 2003. Maxwell wrote out to several dozen of his friends asking for "drawings, photos or stories" to be bound into a private album titled The First Fifty Years. The book was released in September 2025 by the House Oversight Committee. Donald Trump, Wexner, Alan Dershowitz, Peter Mandelson, Leon Black, and George Mitchell all sent in pages (Substack Transcription). Trump's contribution was a few lines of typed text wrapped around the hand-drawn outline of a naked woman, signed off: "Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret."
Seventeen years later, on October 14, 2020, a thirty-two-year veteran of Cantor Fitzgerald's compliance department picked up a phone in the United Kingdom and called the FBI's National Threat Operations Center. The intake routed the tip into Case 50D-NY-3027571 (EFTA01249205). The whistleblower was a Series 30 supervisor with fifty staff in the New York office; he believed he had documents linking Howard Lutnick to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.
When two FBI agents interviewed him on February 16, 2021, the 302 (EFTA01249207) recorded the rest of his story. Lutnick, he said, had given Sarah Ferguson office space above Cantor Fitzgerald's New York floors for a charity called Children in Crisis. Maxwell and Ferguson, in his telling, would "attend Dolce Vita Parties which raised money for CIC and STOW SCHOOL." Lutnick had made "huge donations." Epstein had sold Lutnick a house "for $10 dollars through a trust fund," which was then "sold for millions shortly after prior to the money going overseas."
The FBI did not open an investigation (EFTA00173881).
The tour
The Lutnicks moved into 11 East 71st in the fall of 2005. Allison was pregnant with their fourth child; Casey was four. Sharing a party wall with them was Jeffrey Epstein.
By then, Epstein had been on the cover of New York magazine in October 2002 — "Jeffrey Epstein: International Moneyman of Mystery" — in which Trump told Landon Thomas Jr., "It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side" (NY Mag). Vicky Ward's "The Talented Mr. Epstein" had run in Vanity Fair the following March (VF archive). Maxwell was a fixture in the New York social columns. Sarah Kellen had moved into 9 East 71st as Epstein's executive assistant.
A few months after move-in, Lutnick's side called Epstein's. Epstein's assistant told him his neighbor wanted him over for coffee. Lutnick and Allison walked next door instead. Epstein gave them coffee, then offered a tour. The full Lutnick account of this would follow in a podcast twenty years later. He claims he simply walked out after determining Epstein was gross. One and done.
This doesn't quite match the record. It was Jeffrey who was gone... to Palm Beach, and then to jail.
The plea
Six months before the Lutnicks moved in, a Palm Beach mother walked into a police station. It was March 2005. Her fourteen-year-old stepdaughter, she said, had been driven to a house at 358 El Brillo Way and paid to massage a wealthy man named Jeffrey Epstein (Miami Herald, Perversion of Justice).
By May 2006, detectives had a search warrant. By June 30, 2008, Epstein had pleaded guilty in state court to two counts and was beginning an eighteen-month sentence at the Palm Beach County Stockade. A work-release program let him out twelve hours a day, six days a week, driven by his own private security. His name went on the federal sex-offender registry.
He came home to 9 East 71st in late July 2009.
Three months later, on October 14, 2009, an Epstein staffer named Rich Barnett emailed Epstein to flag that one of Howard Lutnick's employees had asked for Epstein's phone number (EFTA02438886):
>HOward Lutnick would like to speak to you. One of his employees asked me if Howard could have your number so he may call you. Would you like me to give him your number? They did not give me Howard's number.
Asked sixteen years later why he had wanted to reach Epstein in the fall of 2009 — three months after Epstein's release from the Stockade — Lutnick said he didn't remember. May have been construction-related, he told the committee. But I shouldn't speculate. I don't remember.
The foyer
On Sunday, May 1, 2011, Epstein's calendar penciled in "5:00 Drinks w/Howard Lutnick" — booked into the ninety-minute window before his dinner with Woody Allen (EFTA02189429).
In the deposition, Lutnick described the visit this way: he was on his Sunday walk around the block with his wife and their two dogs. Allison waited outside with one. Lutnick rang Epstein's bell, walked into the foyer with the other, waited for Epstein to come down, listened to what he had to say, and left. The topic, he said, was scaffolding. The visit was "meaningless and inconsequential."
That same summer, household correspondence between the two staffs shows the same painter — a man named Dominick Ziewiek — working both houses (EFTA00903892). So is the same lighting designer (EFTA00962138). So is the same heating contractor (EFTA00963565). The neighbors share a wall. They now share their tradesmen.
What they do not need to do, as next-door neighbors, is schedule visits in writing. The corpus records only what got written down.
The cliff
In the third week of December 2012, Lutnick took Allison and their four children to Little Saint James, Epstein's private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Casey Lutnick, the daughter, was eleven.
They were not alone. Travelling with them were Michael Lehrman — Cantor Fitzgerald's Global Head of Real Estate (PR Newswire) — his wife Marcy, and their four children. Lehrman had joined Cantor in 2009 to build the commercial-real-estate platform Lutnick would spin off as Newmark Group in 2017, monetizing roughly $300 million of his personal stake in the IPO (SEC Newmark S-1, 2017).
On December 19, four days before the trip, Lutnick wrote to Epstein from his Cantor account (EFTA00399317):
>Hi Jeff, We are landing in St. Thomas early Saturday afternoon and planning to head over to St. Bart's/Anguilla on Monday at some point. Where are you located (what is exact location for my captain)? Does Sunday evening for dinner sound good? I have another couple (Michael and Marcy Lehrman) with me on my boat, and each of us has 4 children — two 16's, two 14's, a 13, a 12, an 11, and a 7-year old.
The boat was the Excellence V, a 60m yacht built by Abeking & Rasmussen owned by the Boston car-dealership billionaire Herb Chambers and offered through Sapphire Seas at €595,000 a week (Boat International).
On Sunday, December 23, at half past one, the two families and their nannies went ashore for lunch. They walked to a swimming spot on the island called the cliff. The photograph released by the Justice Department in early 2026 shows the men and older boys standing at the edge of it, an empty cove behind them (EFTA01230639; CBS News).
At 6:17 the next morning, Christmas Eve, a document called TopTenDB.pdf moved from Epstein's account into Lutnick's, copying Matthew Menchel — the criminal-defense attorney who had handled Epstein's federal sex-trafficking exposure (EFTA00398744). Cover note: "nice seeing you, read #2 dot three." The attachment did not survive into the public production.
Five days after the cliff lunch, on December 28, 2012, the AdFin Series A held its initial closing in New York. The cash investors were Jonathan Leitersdorf and David Mitchell — Mitchell a Manhattan real-estate developer who would draw roughly $7 million in loans and investments from Epstein over the years (The Real Deal). Bound into the same closing book was a counterpart signature page on which Jeffrey Epstein had signed as a key holder for his St. Thomas vehicle Southern Trust Co. (EFTA00298925) — placed on the deal at the table, five days after lunch.
Two weeks later, on January 8, 2013, Lesley Groff — Epstein's executive assistant — sent Lutnick another scan from the same Sharp/Konica office copier (EFTA00398076). That attachment is also missing from the public production.
On January 18, 2013, Mitchell forwarded Epstein the AdFin overview deck (EFTA00952249). On April 10, Southern Trust subscribed for $500,000 (EFTA00299927). Cantor's own money would follow that summer through Lutnick's investment vehicle, and within three years the firm would own AdFin outright. Lutnick has since told Congress he was unaware Epstein was an investor.
The other families
Around the same time period, Epstein was busy with other families as well. In February, 2013, Epstein hosted quiet dinners on the second floor of 9 East 71st for the Rød-Larsens: Terje, then president of the International Peace Institute, his wife Mona Juul, a senior Norwegian foreign-ministry official, and their twelve-year-old twins Emma and Edward (EFTA01761422). One night, Emma brought a friend her own age.
Epstein gave the Rød-Larsen children Apple computers (EFTA00377743), and guided Emma's twin brother Edward through his years at Stowe — the same English school where Maxwell had been photographed at the La Dolce Vita gala. In September 2016, when Edward had just turned 16yo boarding at Stowe, Epstein FedExed him an "exhorbetant" amount of money (EFTA02041569. The next month, Epstein wrote to a man named Håkon Gundersen: "i expect you to assign it to edward ASAP" — a Budapest apartment (EFTA02448876).
Why Epstein gave an apartment and a lot of money to a 16yo boy with a blonde female twin is not explicitly stated. However, after the files were released, the press speculated. On April 27, 2026, Edward Rød-Larsen, twenty-five years old, took his own life in Oslo.
Epstein was also busy with Eva Andersson-Dubin's family. Eva was Mrs. Sweden 1983; Miss Universe runner-up; and on and off with Epstein through the 1980s. Epstein became godfather to her eldest daughter, Celina (Wall Street Journal). Her youngest, Maya, was eleven the winter the Lutnicks went to the island — the same age as Casey Lutnick. The pictures of Epstein and the girls are all over the files, including a toddler Celina lifting up her dress, preschooler showing her butt, teenager in a bikini leaning into her Uncle F.
The Trump family had been in Epstein's orbit years before. On October 19, 1993, the photographer Dafydd Jones was working the opening of the Harley-Davidson Cafe in Manhattan. He took a picture of Donald Trump there with his arm around two of his children — Eric, and Ivanka, eleven days short of her twelfth birthday and wearing braces. Jeffrey Epstein was at the same railing (Dafydd Jones archive). The Donald also posed in front of a motorcycle with Ivanka on his lap, his hands on her waist, at the same event. Other interactions with the family are not well documented, but Eric Trump and baby Tiffany Trump with nanny flew on his plane at various times, so the family was close. Ivanka was modelling by age 15 (Vanity Fair), at the same time Trump was best friends with Epstein and Epstein was grooming and molesting underage models.
The bat mitzvah
Returning to the Lutnicks. In the fall of 2013, Casey Lutnick was about to turn twelve.
On October 3rd, a Jeffrey Epstein managed to get information on the nanny next door. The subject line read "Emily Dawson resume." The sender was Epstein's accountant Richard Kahn; the cover note identified the attachment as "the resume of Lutnick nanny" and asked Epstein to "meet her" via Peter Mahler — Epstein's domestic-staffing recruiter (EFTA00971793). The resume itself is missing from the released records.
Four weeks later, on November 2nd, the Lutnick's celebrated Casey's bat mitzvah. There was a Sephora makeover station. A temporary-tattoo booth. A Pinkberry counter. Denise Rich and Lorraine Schwartz on the guest list (Haute Living).
Whether Epstein attended the party is not known. He had nothing on his calendar that day, and left for Palm Beach the next morning.
The money
The financial relationship between the two men continued.
Epstein's Southern Trust put $500,000 into AdFin in April 2013, and topped it up later that spring. In July, AdFin's Series A round closed, and the signature pages of Lutnick's investment vehicle CVAFH I LLC and Epstein's Southern Trust were bound, sequentially, into the same physical closing book — the book circulated to every investor in the round EFTA00289560). Lutnick later told Congress he had found the appearance of his signature page "inexplicable and unsettling."
In December 2013, Cantor Fitzgerald extended AdFin a $2 million convertible note (EFTA00289477). By February 2016, Cantor had taken AdFin over outright, and Lutnick had joined its seven-seat board (EFTA01084694).
It was not just AdFin.
In the summer of 2013, on Cantor letterhead, the firm's general counsel Stephen Merkel drafted a joint-venture term sheet for a ten-year partnership between Cantor Holdings and Prince Andrew's UK trust vehicle Urramoor Limited. Charles Douglas — Sarah Ferguson's solicitor and a trustee of Urramoor — was copied. Epstein advised on the counter-terms (EFTA01958916). The eventual executed agreement was narrower in scope.
The honor
In December 2017, an Epstein charity called Gratitude America Ltd. wrote a $50,000 check for a table at the UJA Federation of New York's Wall Street Dinner (EFTA00462552, EFTA00464309).
The night's honoree was Howard Lutnick. He was getting the Gustave L. Levy Award for service to the Jewish community. Robert Rubin gave the keynote. Epstein's name was printed on the program's Roll of Honor (EFTA02568733). Epstein himself didn't use the seats; he told his staff: "no, tell lutnik he can fill them" (EFTA00462650).
That same week, on December 14, Lutnick took Cantor's commercial-real-estate platform public. Newmark Group debuted on NASDAQ (Reuters). The man who had been running the underlying business since 2009 was Michael Lehrman — the same Lehrman who had been at lunch on Little Saint James five years earlier with his wife and his four children.
The View
In 2018, when the Frick Collection filed plans for a renovation that would have eaten the sight line east down 70th Street, Lutnick organized the legal opposition for both houses. From his Cantor account on May 27, 2018, he wrote to Epstein with the chairwoman's pending retirement, the schedule of the Landmarks hearing, and instructions (EFTA00474452):
>You should put in a letter. I'm sending a lawyer. Don't ignore this.
The next day, on iPhones, Epstein replied that his lawyer Darren Indyke would contact Lutnick's. They synced on the hearing schedule. Eleven minutes later Epstein pivoted (EFTA02655287):
>Epstein: on another note what do you think the prospects for adfin are?
>
>Lutnick: Producing revenue finally. This is their year.
>
>Epstein: thx. how long until sherry is ready, and i can buy my guest house?
>
>Lutnick: Probably 4 years (pierre).
The Sherry-Netherland is another Fifth Avenue hotel. Lutnick's parenthetical corrected Epstein's transcription of the property name and answered the timeline. He had bought the top of the Pierre Hotel in August 2017 for $44 million. In May 2018 it was being renovated. Asked about the exchange under deposition, Lutnick called it "a sort of snarky joke."
Casey was seventeen by this point, and Epstein was joking with her father. They were still living side by side with a shared wall.
Lutnick threw a bar mitzvah for Ryan in 2018, at the Metropolitan Museum’s Temple of Dendur, site of the Met Gala, with music by Rich the Kid and DJ Irie. One hundred kids attended with 200 adults, including Duchess of York Sarah Ferguson and Melania Trump’s former adviser Stephanie Winston.
Trump comes over
In the spring of 2019, Lutnick invited Trump over and Epstein got wind of it.
Trump was running for re-election so Lutnick hosted a fundraiser. On Monday, May 13, three days before the event, Anthony Scaramucci — Trump's communications director for eleven days in July 2017 — sent Epstein an iMessage (EFTA00517746).
Trump is coming to Lutnick's house Thursday.
Epstein wrote back: i won't be home otherwise i could have come out an waved.
Ha! I love it, Scaramucci replied.
Inside an hour, Epstein forwarded the tip to his lawyer Darren Indyke and his accountant Richard Kahn: trump goin to lutniks house on thurs. (HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_033144)
On Thursday, May 16, Trump walked through Lutnick's front door. The fundraiser at Lutnick's Manhattan home raised $5 million for the campaign (Bloomberg). The Perversion of Justice coverage had been on the front page of the Miami Herald for six months.
It is not known whether Lutnick and Trump talked about what to do about Epstein. It is not known why Epstein would have forwarded information about their meeting to the two men who would manage his estate after his death.
However, seven weeks later, on July 6, Epstein was arrested at Teterboro Airport. An MCC lieutenant later told investigators (EFTA00113967):
>Epstein was a high-profile inmate. All high-profile inmates they usually assign to 10 South. … Even before he committed suicide. Everybody knew and that's not just here. That's people in the region. You know all the way up to Donald Trump knew Epstein was here. … And when you look at Donald Trump all the way down the line, you know, to the regional director, the correctional services administrator. All those people should have been involved in where he was housed.
He was put in 9 South. On August 10, a guard found him dead in his cell. The cameras nearby were off or not recording. Both guards' logs were falsified (NYT).
Two months after that, on October 11, 2019, Cantor Fitzgerald decided it was time to shut AdFin Solutions down. It had been pumping in millions into the failing company up to that point, but saw no reason to continue after Epstein's death. The shutdown was reported only in trade press; no public filing named Jeffrey Epstein (AdExchanger). Lutnick and Trump's Epstein problem just faded away.
The reward
By 2024, the Epstein files had become a plank of a presidential campaign. The people inside were kept close.
On August 2, 2024, Trump came to Lutnick's house in Bridgehampton. The fundraiser raised $15 million (The Real Deal). Two weeks later, Lutnick was named co-chair of the Trump-Vance transition, alongside Linda McMahon. In November, Trump nominated him as Secretary of Commerce. The Senate confirmed him 51-45 on February 18, 2025.
The same day, a press release out of One World Trade Center named the next generation at Cantor Fitzgerald: Brandon Lutnick as chairman and chief executive, Kyle Lutnick as executive vice chairman (Fortune). Allison Lutnick was appointed a trustee of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Casey, twenty-three, was working at a clinical-stage gene-therapy company called MeiraGTx. Three months later, an SEC filing named her — alongside her three brothers — an investment trustee and distribution trustee on the family trust.
The podcast
In October 2025, four months before the Justice Department began releasing the Epstein files, Lutnick sat down with the New York Post columnist Miranda Devine on a podcast called Pod Force One (video). At thirty seconds in, Devine raised the man on the other side of his wall.
"Jeffrey Epstein was your neighbor. I would be remiss if I didn't ask you about him. … You were — he was your neighbor for ten years. How well did you know him?"
"All right," Lutnick said. "So we are in number 11 and he lives in number nine. So, uh, we renovate, we buy our house, and our house is pigeons and mice, right? It was derelict, right? So we build, we rebuild our house, we move in in 2005. Jeffrey Epstein is arrested in like '08, I think, or something like that. So, knock on the door. His assistant on like a Saturday says, 'Mr. Epstein, your neighbor would like to invite you over for coffee.' So my wife and I go next door. We walk the seven steps to the next house for coffee. We share a wall. So he invites us in. We have coffee. And he says, 'Do you want a tour?' We said, 'Great.' His house is super big, really wide. So he gives me a tour in the living room. Big living room. And then across from it is double doors. I assume it's the dining room. And he opens the doors and there's a massage table in the middle of the room and candles all around and stuff.
"So I ask very insightful cutting questions. I say to him, 'Massage table in the middle of your house? How often you have a massage?' And he says, 'Every day.' And then he like gets like weirdly close to me and he says, 'And the right kind of massage.' Now my wife is standing here. So she looks at me and I look at her and we say, 'I'm sorry. We have to go.' And we left. And in the six or eight steps it takes to get from his house to my house, my wife and I decided that I will never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again. So I was never in the room with him socially, for business or even philanthropy. If that guy was there, I wasn't going. Cuz he's gross."
He kept going.
"And so I look back at it as a gift. He gave me a gift. Of a voice. And so yeah, that's my story. A one and absolutely done."
Devine asked how Bill Gates and the rest of them could have failed to see what Lutnick saw — "or did they see it and ignore it?"
"No. They participated, right? That's what his MO was. You know, get a massage. Get a massage. And what happened in that massage room, I assume, was on video. This guy was the greatest blackmailer ever. Blackma[il] people, that's how he had money."
"So what happened to those videos?" Devine asked. "Why is there now such a dearth of information, when, you know, Donald Trump's people are running the FBI and the DOJ?"
"I assume way back when, they traded those videos in exchange for him getting that 18-month sentence — which allowed him to have visits and be out of jail. I mean, he's a serial sex offender. How could he get 18 months and be able to go to his office during the day and have visitors and stuff? Must have been a trade. So my assumption — not, I have no knowledge — but my assumption is there was a trade for the videos because there were people on those videos."
"Have you talked to Donald Trump about this and shared your theory?"
"No. I mean he knows the story, right? But like my story that, you know, I was the one and done with the guy. He knows that story. But that's it."
"Did Trump feel the same way about him?"
"I don't speak to him about these kind of — these are just distractions."
The Department of Justice and the FBI had, in a memorandum released three months earlier, found "no credible evidence" that Jeffrey Epstein had blackmailed prominent individuals or maintained a client list (DOJ/FBI memo, July 7, 2025). Lutnick was a sitting Cabinet member on the record contradicting his own administration's finding.
The deposition
Four months later, the file release began. The account did not hold.
On February 18, 2026, the House Oversight Committee deposed Leslie Wexner. About four and a half hours in, Wexner's attorney Michael Levy was caught on a hot microphone leaning toward his client: "I'll fucking kill you if you answer another question in more than five words, OK?" (Newsweek).
On May 6, Howard Lutnick sat for the same committee. He was not under oath. The session was not on video. The terms had been negotiated by his attorney, John Terwilliger.
Across ninety-six pages (transcript), the Pod Force One framing came apart in pieces. Lutnick had bought 11 East 71st, he said, from a man named Charles de Gunzburg. He did not mention the 1996 conveyance Epstein had signed as Trustee, or the Memorandum that had given Epstein the right to clear the next sale.
The "guesthouse" exchange, he explained, was Epstein joking that he would buy Lutnick's townhouse once Lutnick had finished the apartment at the top of the Pierre. Epstein had gotten the hotel name wrong; he meant Sherry-Netherland.
He had been on Little Saint James for about an hour, he said. For lunch. With his wife and his children and his friends. He had not gone inside any building. He had not seen any young women or any girls. He had not known the photograph of him on the cliff existed until the Justice Department released it.
A committee member asked him whether the photograph captured the moment he had been describing. Lutnick agreed: "Yes. It's entirely confirmatory, that photo."
His "one and absolutely done" line did not survive Rep. Suhas Subramanyam:
>Subramanyam: When you're sitting down with him talking about scaffolding, aren't you with him in that room? Even if your wife is there, you're both with him, right?
>
>Lutnick: Sure.
>
>Subramanyam: Are you and I with each other right now? Are we in the same room right now?
>
>Lutnick: Yes.
>
>Subramanyam: So how can you say that you were not with him subsequently?
Lutnick reframed: never in a room had been a private shorthand with his wife meaning he would avoid being alone with Epstein, not that the two had never shared a physical space.
The blackmail theory did not survive Rep. Ro Khanna:
>Khanna: Do you know anyone that he had blackmailed, or heard anyone that he blackmailed?
>
>Lutnick: No.
>
>Khanna: Did you believe that he engaged in blackmail?
>
>Lutnick: It was just my speculation at the time.
>
>Khanna: Is it still your belief?
>
>Lutnick: No.
>
>Khanna: Now you believe he didn't engage in blackmail?
>
>Lutnick: Yes. I don't believe he did.
>
>Khanna: And why is that?
>
>Lutnick: Because there have been people from the administration who have all of the details who have said so, and I credit what they've said.
His interactions with Jeffrey Epstein, Lutnick told the committee, had been meaningless and inconsequential.
After the transcript was released, Khanna told reporters that if Trump had seen it, he would have fired Lutnick (Raw Story). The Republican chairman, James Comer, said Lutnick had not been "100 percent truthful" (PBS NewsHour).
Oversight Democrats sent Lutnick a letter calling on him to resign (letter to Secretary Lutnick).
Howard Lutnick remains the forty-first Secretary of Commerce of the United States. He still owns the house next door to Jeffrey Epstein's.
Go read his (wikipedia)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Lutnick] for more.
What's been scrubbed
Each item below is a place the production-side enumeration counted the page and the page never made it to a public Bates. The R1 stamps adjacent to every attachment gap are themselves assigned — whoever ran the production had the file in hand.
The Dawson nanny résumé attachment — Oct 3, 2013
Richard Kahn (HBRK) → Epstein, "Attached is resume of Lutnick nanny." Cover survives in four copies; attachment excluded in both dataset lineages.
| Item | EFTA | R1 stamp | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cover (dataset-11) | EFTA02678195 | EFTA_R1_01975428 | Assigned |
| Attachment | — | EFTA_R1_01975429 | GAP |
| Next page | EFTA02678196 | EFTA_R1_01975430 | Assigned |
| Cover (dataset-10) | EFTA01954703 | EFTA_R1_00424291 | Assigned |
| Attachment | — | EFTA_R1_00424292 | GAP |
| Next page | EFTA01954704 | EFTA_R1_00424293 | Assigned |
TopTenDB.pdf — Dec 24, 2012
"please forward to howard lutnik / nice seeing you, read #2 dot three," Menchel cc'd.
| Item | EFTA | R1 stamp | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cover (dataset-10) | EFTA02018722 | EFTA_R1_00522770 | Assigned |
| Attachment p.1 | — | EFTA_R1_00522771 | GAP |
| Attachment p.2 | — | EFTA_R1_00522772 | GAP |
| Next doc | EFTA02018723 | EFTA_R1_00522773 | Assigned |
20130108114617637.pdf — Jan 8, 2013
Sharp/Konica scan from Epstein's office to Howard, two weeks after TopTenDB.
| Item | EFTA | R1 stamp | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cover (dataset-10) | EFTA02150969 | EFTA_R1_00813634 | Assigned (2pp) |
| Attachment | — | EFTA_R1_00813635 – 00813642 | 8-stamp GAP |
| Next doc | EFTA02150971 | EFTA_R1_00813643 | Assigned |