Lutnick’s deposition has wrapped after roughly four hours. Before the interview finished, committee Chair James Comer, R-Ky., told reporters that Lutnick had been “very transparent.”
He criticized Democrats’ characterization of Lutnick’s testimony and portrayed him as being eager to answer the committee’s questions about his encounters with Epstein.
“Right off the bat, he corrected his statement on the time that he came to the island,” Comer said, and he explained that “somehow Epstein found out that his family and friends were going to be vacationing in the Caribbean or around the Virgin Islands, and they, he invited them to lunch, and they docked there for, he thinks, no more than two hours. It was his wife and four other family members, and then six, six, so there were 12 in a group. They didn’t go in the house or anything there.”
Democrats, Comer said, “repeated the exact same questions because there’s only so many questions you can ask Howard Lutnick, who lived, had a property next door to Epstein in New York, but talked to him three times over a decade.”
“I feel like that Lutnick has been very transparent. He came in voluntarily,” Comer said. “We’ll continue our investigation, and if we find that there were any misstatements by Lutnick, it’s a — it’s a felony to lie to Congress, and he’ll be held accountable. It’s too bad it’s not a felony for a member of Congress to lie to the media, or we would be, we would have a lot of Democrats that would be having to lawyer up right now.”
