Dems demand Lutnick resign over Jeffrey Epstein interview

House Democrats on Thursday demanded Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick‘s resignation, alleging he publicly lied about his relationship with notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and refused to “come clean” during a subsequent closed-door interview.

“The facts are clear: you lied to the American people and attempted to conceal your relationship with Jeffrey Epstein in your public statements,” the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform’s Democratic minority said in a letter to Lutnick.

“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,” read the letter signed by all 21 of the panel’s Democratic members.

Lutnick claimed in an interview last year that, following a visit to Epstein’s Manhattan mansion shortly after he moved next door to him in 2005, he had “decided that I will never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again.”

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

But after the Department of Justice’s release of Epstein-related files showed continued ties between the two men years later, Lutnick admitted in a Senate hearing that he and his family had lunch on the disgraced financier’s private island in 2012.

Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to a state-level charge of soliciting a minor for prostitution, which required him to register as a sex offender. He died in a New York City jail in 2019 while facing federal sex-trafficking charges. His death was ruled a suicide.

Democrats wrote in Thursday’s letter that Lutnick’s claim in the 2025 interview was “demonstrably false.”

“During your transcribed interview, you were presented with clear evidence that you corresponded and physically met with Epstein on multiple occasions prior to his arrest in 2019,” including the private island lunch, they wrote.

“Given the opportunity to come clean” during the interview, “you instead offered implausible distinctions and semantic games,” the lawmakers wrote.

A Commerce Department spokesperson, in a statement to CNBC, called the letter “another failing attempt by congressional Democrats to distract from Secretary Lutnick’s historic work at the Commerce Department.”

“In a voluntary appearance before the Oversight Committee, Secretary Lutnick answer nearly 400 questions from members and staff, ending only when members said they had nothing more to ask,” the spokesperson said.

“He explained repeatedly that three encounters did not constitute a…