President Donald Trump’s Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, dropped a bombshell regarding his relationship with the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
Lutnick said Epstein was his neighbor, and showed him a massage room with a table in the middle of his Manhattan townhouse. Lutnick said his billionaire former neighbor was “the greatest blackmailer ever” who may have traded compromising videos to secure his controversial 2008 plea deal.
Lutnick contradicted the Department of Justice and FBI Director Kash Patel’s recent assessment that there is no evidence Epstein trafficked young women to other people or blackmailed associates.
The 64-year-old cabinet secretary said Epstein gave him and his wife a tour of his East 71st Street townhouse after the couple moved next door in 2005.
“I say to him, ‘Massage table in the middle of your house? How often do you have a massage?'” Lutnick told The New York Post. “And he says, ‘Every day.’ And then he gets, like weirdly close to me, and he says, ‘And the right kind of massage.'”
Lutnick said he and his wife left immediately.
“In the six to 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.”
When asked whether Epstein’s rich and powerful associates — including Prince Andrew and Microsoft founder Bill Gates — “could hang around him and not see what you saw, or did they see it and ignore it,” Lutnick responded there was no way.
“They participated,” he said. “They get a massage, that’s what his MO 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, he blackmailed people,” Lutnick revealed. “That’s how he had money.”
“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? There must have been a trade,” Lutnick said. “So, my assumption, I have no knowledge, but my assumption is there was a trade for the videos, because there were people on those videos.”
A spokesperson for Bill Gates denied Lutnick’s claims.
“This is absolutely false,” the spokesperson said. “Gates met with Epstein to discuss philanthropy and nothing else.”
A photo allegedly taken by Epstein showed Gates at his Seattle office in March 2014, six years after Epstein registered as a sex offender and went to prison. Gates met Epstein face-to-face for the first time at dinner in Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse in January 2011.
Lutnick’s claims contradict what Patel said about the late pedophile during a September Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. Patel said there is “no credible information” to suggest Epstein trafficked young women to his friends or associates.
“If there were, I would bring the case yesterday that he trafficked to other individuals,” Patel said.
The remarks were condemned by a group of Epstein’s victims, who issued a joint statement saying they were “struggling to understand” why Patel would suggest otherwise.
“Even the limited information that has been made public includes accounts such as Virginia Giuffre’s report that Epstein trafficked her to other individuals besides himself,” the statement said. “We also understand… that there are FBI reports documenting witness interviews in which victims of Epstein and [Ghislaine] Maxwell named at least 20 other men they were trafficked to.”
The DOJ and FBI released a memo July 6 claiming a review found Epstein held no “client list” of rich elitists and powerful globalists were his partners in crime. The memo stated there was “no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions” and no “evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties” — despite Epstein having “harmed over one thousand victims.”
A 2020 DOJ Office of Professional Responsibility report on the prosecution said none of the victims who spoke with law enforcement mentioned video recordings made during encounters.
Epstein was forced in 2008 to register as a sex offender and plead guilty to Florida charges of soliciting prostitution and soliciting a minor for sex as part of an agreement that saw him serve no more than 13 months confinement, most of it on work release. The South Florida US Attorney’s Office, headed by Alex Acosta, reached the non-prosecution agreement with Epstein.
Epstein quietly paid girls hundreds of dollars to give him massages in his Florida home.
Epstein, 66, was found dead under mysterious circumstance inside his Manhattan lockup on August 10, 2019, while awaiting federal trial on sex trafficking charges.
Former President Bill Clinton had a close association with Epstein in the 1990s and 2000s, and flew aboard his private jet numerous times — sometimes without his secret service detail. Trump also had a friendship with Epstein but banned him from Mar-a-Lago after learning the pedophile was recruiting spa workers at his club.
“People were taken out of the spa, hired by him. When I heard about it, I told him, I said, ‘Listen, we don’t want you taking our people,’ whether it was spa or not spa, I don’t want him taking people. And he was fine. And then not too long after that, he did it again. And I said, ‘Out of here,'” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on July 29.