House Democrats want Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to resign over misleading statements he made about Jeffrey Epstein. However, if that were the bar, President JD Vance would need to fill a lot of positions.
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Every Democratic member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on Thursday called on Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to resign for trying to hide the extent of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
The Democrats accused Lutnick of being evasive in an interview with the committee on May 6. The transcript of that interview was released earlier this week, and it was not a good look for the Trump administration official, who had claimed last year that he had only met Epstein once and decided not to “ever be in a room with that disgusting person again.”
However, it was later revealed that he and his family made a stop on the disgraced financier’s island during a sailing trip, and that the two of them got together at least one other time.
When the lawmakers quizzed him about this discrepancy, Lutnick made the case that those other meetings, which he repeatedly called “meaningless and inconsequential,” didn’t count because he and Epstein were not alone and his wife was present.
This led to one of the most amusing exchanges of the interview.
“Are you and I with each other right now?” asked Rep. Suhas Subramanyam (D-VA). “Are we in the same room right now?”
Of course, it is no laughing matter that Lutnick was dishonest last year when he misrepresented how often he met Epstein, who was his neighbor in 2005 and lived “literally 8 or 10 steps next door.”
During the meeting, he stated that he had no idea that Epstein was a serial sexual abuser, and that nobody had ever told him that his neighbor was a registered sex offender even though he had underage children at the time.
Even if all of that is true, the committee’s Democrats believe that Lutnick’s behavior disqualifies him from holding a senior position in the administration.
“The facts are clear: you lied to the American people and attempted to conceal your relationship with Jeffrey Epstein in your public statements,” they wrote. “Your lack of candor demonstrates that you are unfit to perform the duties required of you as secretary of Commerce, and you must step down immediately.”
Noting that “a cabinet secretary’s most basic obligation to Congress is candor,” they accused Lutnick of “perpetuat[ing] a false public narrative,” “contradict[ing] prior statements and stonewall[ing] on basic questions.”
The Democrats also lamented that the secretary only agreed to sit down with the panel once he was threatened with a subpoena, and that Americans were deprived of the opportunity to watch the interview because the committee’s GOP majority did not want to videotape it. This, according to the letter calling for his resignation, prevented the public “from viewing the evasiveness and dishonesty that the transcript alone cannot fully convey.”
Obviously, this testimony isn’t going to get Lutnick to resign even if he wasn’t being truthful in a podcast interview. It’s not as though he lied under oath, and even that is apparently not a disqualifying offense in this administration.
However, it is equally clear that this issue isn’t going away, and that Donald Trump’s bizarre behavior with regard to his former pal will continue to be a problem for his administration – and that Democrats will use every opportunity to talk about it.
