Howard Lutnick Suddenly Changes Entire Story About His Epstein Ties |
Howard Lutnick Suddenly Changes Entire Story About His Epstein Ties
Donald Trump’s commerce secretary claimed he couldn’t remember why he was at Jeffrey Epstein’s island.
Democrats on the House Oversight Committee claimed Wednesday that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick lied several times during his testimony about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
During a closed-door hearing to discuss his ties to the alleged sex trafficker, Lutnick reneged on past claims about Epstein recording his guests’ sexual misconduct and using it to blackmail them, Representative Ro Khanna told reporters after the hearing. Lutnick had previously called Epstein “the greatest blackmailer ever.”
“So, somebody obviously got to him, from the administration. In fact, he said he talked to people in the administration and that’s why he’s changed his tune,” Khanna said. “And the question is not just why he’s lying, the question is why he’s covering up. The question is why he’s no longer willing to share what he knows about Epstein’s abhorrent behavior.
“If Donald Trump had seen the video transcript he would’ve fired Howard Lutnick. It was very embarrassing,” the California Democrat added.
Lutnick swore in an interview last year he did not see Epstein after 2005, but it was then revealed he coordinated a family trip (with his young kids) to the financier’s “pedophile island” in 2012. Lutnick then confirmed he’d kept in touch with Epstein over the years, even after Epstein was convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor.
“Howard Lutnick should resign,” Virginia Representative Suhas Subramanyam told reporters following the hearing. “That was absolutely mind-boggling, what we just heard in the room. He was evasive, nervous. He was dishonest.”
“He would not admit to lying, which he clearly did in the podcast,” Subramanyam said, referring to Lutnick’s remarks on the New York Post’s Pod Force One in October 2025, when the secretary claimed that after meeting Epstein, he decided he would “never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again.”
“I had to ask him whether he and I were in the same room, just now, because I couldn’t understand his meaning of ‘we were in the same room together,’” Subramanyam said.
Lutnick also refused to provide any explanation for why he and his family traveled to Epstein’s island.
“We asked him over and over again, ‘Why did you go to the island?’ He says he doesn’t remember, that it was inexplicable, and he simply didn’t know how to answer the question at that point,” Subramanyam said.
Tennessee Republicans Propose Map Eliminating State’s Only Democrat
Tennessee’s Republican Party is gearing up to carve up the state’s one Democratic district, which just happens to be majority-Black.
The Tennessee GOP’s new election map would eliminate the state’s only Democratic representative and carve up the majority-Black Memphis-area district he represents.
The map would gerrymander away Democratic Representative Steve Cohen’s Shelby County district and likely give Republicans a 9–0 majority in the state. The Memphis metropolitan area would be divided up into three separate districts.
“This is insane. The GOP’s newly proposed TN Congressional maps would have people in Shelby County all the way to Williamson County—200 miles apart—being “represented” by the same Congressman,” Cohen wrote on X after the map was announced. “It’s a blatant, corrupt power grab that would destroy the Black community’s and our entire city’s voice.”
The redrawn map is the latest in a barrage of Republican gerrymandering efforts in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling that crippled Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act last month. Section 2 granted protections to African Americans and other racial minorities against redistricting.
The new map is expected to pass in a Thursday vote.
DOJ Sues Colorado Over Law Meant to Prevent Mass Shootings
The law bans high-capacity ammunition magazines.
The Justice Department sued the state of Colorado Wednesday over a gun control law that has been on the books for more than a decade.
The state passed the law, House Bill 13-1224, in 2013, months after a gunman opened fire on a movie theater in Aurora, killing 12 people and injuring 70 others. The law formally banned the sale, transfer, and possession of magazines carrying more than 15 rounds of ammunition within state lines.
It’s the second such attack this week by the Trump administration on Colorado’s various attempts to curb gun violence. On Tuesday, the DOJ took aim at the city of Denver for a 1989 city law that banned assault weapons.
The nation’s premier law office has argued that both laws violate the Second Amendment right to bear arms. In its complaint, the DOJ claimed that the state’s use of the phrase “large capacity” amounted to “politically charged rhetoric.” The agency further claimed that the phrase “large capacity” was incorrect due to the popularity of semiautomatic guns such as the AR-15, which DOJ attorneys said would make 15 round ammunition “standard capacity.”
Mass shootings are a global scourge that only the U.S. has failed to adequately address. Gun violence in America has become so ubiquitous that it is almost silent: In the first five months of the year, 145 mass shootings across the country claimed the lives of 185 victims and injured another 561 people, according to data collected by the Gun Violence Archive.
AR-15s are nothing short of civilian-killing machines. As The New Republic’s Colin Dickey noted in his review of American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15, Eugene Stoner’s 1954 invention “exists to extinguish human lives.”
The gun’s popularity within the contemporary American canon comes from........