Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick recounted in congressional testimony how a coffee with Jeffrey Epstein ended after a "gross and inappropriate" comment.
Lutnick testified last week before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and discussed his interactions with Epstein. He told the committee that he moved into a house in 2005 and Epstein became his neighbor. After moving in, Epstein invited Lutnick and his wife over for coffee.
While being given a tour of Epstein's home, Lutnick said he and his wife stumbled across an open massage table and in a room.
"How often do you have a massage?," Lutnick said he asked.
"Every day and the right kind of massage," Epstein replied, according to Lutnick's testimony.
Lutnick said that he and his wife found the exchange "gross and inappropriate" and quickly left. He went on to say he and his wife discussed Epstein and decided that it would be best to just "avoid him."
However, despite that decision, the couple and their four children would later have lunch in 2012 on Epstein's island, Little Saint James. According to his testimony, Lutnick said that Epstein contacted him via an email that was sent by one of his associates.
"Hello, Mr. Lutnick, Jeffrey Epstein understands you will be down in St. Thomas some over the holidays. Jeffrey requested I please pass along some phone numbers to you so the two of you can possibly get together. Any numbers you wanted to pass along to Jeffrey would be great as well," an email from the Epstein associate stated.
Lutnick said he found the communication from Epstein "inexplicable."
"What I still cannot understand is this November 20, how or why, without any communication for years would he inexplicably know where I'm going. It's unsettling, actually. But this is how it happened. You know, I don't know why it happened, but this is - you're actually literally seeing how it happened, but it is inexplicable that he would - and his staff would know where I was going to be. I had no interactions with him," Lutnick told the House committee.
During the visit, Lutnick said they sat outside and had lunch. He described it as "boring," and the family left.
Another matter raised by the committee involved a now-defunct company called AdFin Solutions. Lutnick was chairman of the financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald and a subsidiary of Cantor Fitzgerald and Jeffrey Epstein were both investors in the company.
Lutnick said he did not know that Epstein was an investor in the company. However, somehow Epstein ended up with the signatory page from the stock purchase agreement of the Cantor Fitzgerald subsidiary, which Lutnick had signed.
"I found it inexplicable and unsettling that he had - that it was released, that my company's signature page would be in someone else's files. It is - it's unsettling," Lutnick testified.
In 2018, Epstein had sent Lutnick an email that asked, "What do you think the prospects for AdFin are?" When asked why Epstein would ask him that, Lutnick said, he didn't know, but said the company was heavily marketing itself at the time: "So it wouldn't surprise me that people knew about it. I was not - it wouldn't have been unusual. It was out there trying to make - get attention."
