President Donald Trump won't get rid of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick over his lies about his relationship with deceased financier and accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein any time soon, because Trump fears he would end up going down with him.
That's according to legal expert Lisa Rubin, who spoke Friday with MS NOW's Nicolle Wallace.
"The general counsel at one of the biggest banks in the country, certainly in New York, a big job, someone who had big jobs in politics, is out of work," said Wallace. "The former head of Paul Weiss is no longer the head of Paul Weiss because of his emails, where he seemed to be offering Jeffrey Epstein strategy on how to how to delegitimize the claims of survivors and victims. How sustainable is it to not have any consequences or laws of gravity apply to Trump's Cabinet?"
"I don't know, but I think one of the reasons that he can't allow for there to be any consequences is because it obviously shifts our focus to him," said Rubin.
"Like Lutnick went to the island with whatever, five nannies and three kids, but Trump's in there 38,000 times," agreed Wallace.
"Correct," said Rubin. "I mean, and to be fair, a lot of the Trump mentions are because Jeffrey was obsessed with him, right? He collected news stories about him. The mentions when people talk about, oh, there are so many mentions of Trump that includes the word fragment, which also could be found in the word 'don't.' So I wanted people to take that with a grain of salt."
"'Don't' being in there is not why Trump refused to release them," interjected Wallace.
"No, that's of course not why Trump refused to release them," said Rubin. "And if we put the focus on somebody like Howard Lutnick, who publicly said that he and his wife vowed in 2005 never to be in Jeffrey Epstein's home, which was next door to theirs, ever again. And yet the files show that they went to his island once for a lunch."
"If we are that focused on a single lunch, imagine what would happen if Howard Lutnick were to suffer consequences, because our eyes would automatically turn back to the person who has demonstrably, much more extensive ties with Jeffrey Epstein, who is quoted in a near canon-like article about Jeffrey Epstein from 2002, saying, as we've all quoted on air multiple times, 'Jeffrey likes beautiful women. He likes them almost as much as I do. And on the younger side.'"
"And now we have that 302 document, the FBI's manner of memorializing an interview, with Michael Ryder, who was the chief of police in Palm Beach in 2006, who is telling Southern District of New York prosecutors in 2019, I spoke to Donald Trump and Donald Trump told me, thank goodness you've caught this guy, everybody knew what he was doing, it was disgusting, and Ghislaine Maxwell is evil. If Howard Lutnick falls, what does that say about Trump?"