Trump Cabinet member planned Epstein island trip long after claim he cut ties

President Donald Trump's Secretary of Commerce planned a trip to accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein's infamous private island in 2012, The New York Times reported on Friday, years after the period inhe claimed to have severed ties with Epstein.

Howard Lutnick, a finance industry billionaire who has been the public face of Trump's controversial tariff policies, has previously claimed that he and his wife visited Epstein's residence in 2005, and were so disgusted by his obsession with massages that they left and never interacted with him in person again.

"I was never in the room with him socially, for business, or even philanthropy. If that guy was there, I wasn’t going, because he’s gross," Lutnick has said.

However, per the records released in the latest batch of Epstein case files on Friday, "In December 2012, the records show, Mr. Lutnick sent an email to Mr. Epstein saying that he had a group of people — including his wife and children and another family — who were visiting the Caribbean. He asked where Mr. Epstein was located and whether they could visit for a meal. Mr. Epstein replied through an assistant to give more information about the location of Little St. James, his private island off the coast of St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. They eventually settled on plans for a lunch gathering."

Asked for comment over the phone by reporters, Lutnick simply said “I spent zero time with him,” and ended the conversation.

Additionally, the report noted, "The documents show that Mr. Lutnick and Mr. Epstein’s lives continued to overlap in more recent years. In 2017, Mr. Epstein contributed to a charity dinner honoring Mr. Lutnick. In 2018, they exchanged emails that appear to discuss them joining forces to battle construction plans by The Frick Collection, a museum across the street from both of their homes."

This comes as the Trump administration has dragged its feet for weeks past the congressionally mandated deadline to redact and release all Epstein files. It also comes amid reporting that the latest batch of documents exposes private victim information, which was supposedly the entire purpose for the delay to avoid doing.