President Donald Trump on Friday offered a strong show of support for embattled Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick by bringing him along on a visit to special forces troops at Fort Bragg en route to his Palm Beach, Florida home.
The whisk-away on Air Force One comes despite calls for Lutnick to resign over his ties to and misleading comments about his relationship with dead sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Trump declined to answer a reporter’s question as he departed the White House on whether he would ask for Lutnick to step down or sack him after he confirmed having made a 2012 visit to Epstein’s infamous private island — seven years after the claimed to have cut ties to the notorious sex trafficker.
But a list of the people who will travel with Trump to North Carolina and Florida this weekend obtained by The Independent shows Lutnick as one of the president’s guests aboard Air Force One, along with North Carolina Senator Ted Budd, Representatives Richard Hudson, Brad Knott and David Rouzer, plus First Lady Melania Trump and a range of White House staff.
Lutnick has been under sustained fire since Tuesday, when he admitted to the Senate Commerce Committee that he’d made the trip to Epstein’s home on Little Saint James (part of the U.S. Virgin Islands) for lunch with his wife and children 14 years ago.
Documents released by the Department of Justice had revealed how Lutnick had been in contact with Epstein, his onetime nextdoor neighbor in New York, via email to arrange the visit.
The emails contradicted statements Lutnick had made to the New York Post during a podcast appearance in October when he said he’d cut off contact with Epstein — who died in a New York jail cell while awaiting sex trafficking charges in 2019 — after a 2005 encounter that he claimed had left him so unsettled that he’d vowed to “never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again.”
The commerce secretary has long been known to have had ties to Epstein, who was his next-door neighbor in New York at one point, years before he pleaded guilty to prostitution charges in Florida as part of a sweetheart deal with a George W Bush-era prosecutor who later became Trump’s first Secretary of Labor during his first term.
But the documents reviewed by The Independent show that Lutnick not only planned to visit Epstein’s island in 2012 but maintained ties with Epstein as late as 2018 — the year before he was indicted on federal sex trafficking charges and long after he’d spent time in jail for state-level offenses related to his preying on young girls.
Trump’s decision to host Lutnick on board the presidential aircraft — a highly sought-after perk for cabinet members — comes a day after he claimed not to have known about Lutnick’s trip to the pedophile financier’s private getaway but moments later told a reporter he had heard about details of the trip.
Speaking from the Roosevelt Room during an event to announce the repeal of a longstanding climate rule reviled by the fossil fuel industry, Trump was asked if he’d been aware of Lutnick’s travel to Little Saint James and whether he still has confidence in the former bond trading executive.
“No, I wasn’t aware of it … I actually haven’t spoken to him about it … but from what I hear, he was there with his wife and children,” Trump said, just days after Lutnick was forced to admit he had traveled to the notorious locale.
He added: “I was never there — somebody will someday say that I was never there.”
Trump notably did not answer the second part of the question as to whether he has confidence in Lutnick, a longtime friend who had pushed to become Treasury Secretary after serving as the finance chief for the president’s 2024 campaign.
But White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Tuesday that Trump “fully supports” Lutnick and described him as “a very important member of President Trump’s team.”
Source: independent.co.uk