Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick revealed new details Wednesday of a past visit to Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan mansion, calling the disgraced financier “the greatest blackmailer ever."
Epstein died in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges, and was alleged to have run a blackmail operation targeting powerful figures. He was first convicted for sex crimes in 2008 after receiving a generous plea deal that, despite the FBI having identified as many as 40 potential minor victims of Epstein’s, allowed him to plead guilty to one charge of soliciting prostitution from a minor.
That plea deal was offered to Epstein by Trump’s former labor secretary Alexander Acosta – then a federal prosecutor in Florida – who said he was told Epstein “belonged to intelligence” and that he should “leave it alone” as the matter was “above his paygrade.”
Nearly all of Epstein’s alleged victims make mention of the disgraced financier's use of massages to groom young girls, and Lutnick, in a new video interview with the New York Post published Wednesday, recalled a 2005 visit to Epstein’s townhome in New York City.
He said he was immediately taken aback upon entering the mansion.
“I say to him, ‘massage table in the middle of your house? How often do you have a massage?'” Lutnick said. “And he says, ‘every day.’ And then he gets, like, weirdly close to me, and he says, ‘and the right kind of massage.'”
Lutnick went on, “That’s what his [modus operandi] was; 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. Blackmailed people, that’s how he had money.”
Both of Trump’s administrations had many figures with close ties to Epstein. His former attorney general Bill Barr faced recusal questions over investigations into Epstein given that his former law firm had represented the disgraced financier, and Barr’s father, Donald Barr, was the headmaster of Dalton School, where Epstein at just 21 years old was given a job as a teacher, despite never having graduated from college himself.
Trump’s former White House chief strategist, Steve Bannon, has also met with Epstein several times, and had even recorded 15 hours of footage shortly before his death in a Manhattan jail cell — footage that has yet to be released in full.
