The email chain that helped expose President Donald Trump's billionaire Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick for concealing the extent of his ties to deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was finally revealed by the BBC on Tuesday.
Lutnick has long claimed that his relationship with Epstein was brief and that he cut him off in 2005, as soon as he visited his Virgin Islands estate and realized the creepy nature of the "massages" he enjoyed from children — but that story has been falling apart for some time, and Lutnick is now known to have proposed business dealings with Epstein as recently as 2018.
According to the new report, Congress was made aware of Epstein and Lutnick's more recent discussions after "Simon Andriesz, previously a managing director at a Wall Street firm, discovered an email chain from 2018 in which Lutnick and Epstein had discussed the prospects of a start-up business they were both involved in" and forwarded that on to congressional investigators.
As Andriesz scanned the documents, he discovered "that one of Lutnick's firms had made plans in 2013 to go into business with another figure linked to Epstein, the then-Prince Andrew, by commercially exploiting the contacts the former UK trade envoy had made." Per Andriesz, "What it involved was a loan to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor of £1m... to basically buy a prince."
The key to uncovering all this, said Andriesz, is that everyone was trying to search the database with "Lutnick" as the query, and he instead searched Lutnick's initials, "HWL" — and struck pay dirt.
In these emails, reported the BBC, "Epstein had talked directly to Lutnick about a digital advertising company called Adfin, in which he and Lutnick's firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, had both invested." In one email chain, Epstein asked "HWL," "what do you think the prospects for adfin are?" to which Lutnick replied: "Producing revenue finally. This is their year. Next 12 months they need to become economically self-sufficient."
Andrew, for his part, was stripped of his military titles in 2022, stripped of his princehood in 2025, and was arrested earlier this year on suspicion of misconduct in public office, over allegations he shared confidential government information with Epstein while serving as UK trade envoy.