This weekend, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick was interviewed on Pod Force One, and he did not hold back.
The conversation covered everything from Jeffrey Epstein to 9/11 to Trump's recent trade deal with the European Union.
What I find most interesting, however, were the comments he made about Epstein, to whom he apparently lived near at one point in time.
Lutnick suffered real tragedy on Sept. 11, 2001, as he lost numerous people in his life to the terrorist attacks of that fateful day. He recounted losing his brother, several friends, and numerous colleagues.
He described, “I’m just in the school, and then my phone keeps ringing, but I have a flip phone, but there’s no one on the other end. I kept saying, like I was annoyed, like, ‘They can’t just leave me alone for an hour to take my kid to school? Something has to call me from work?’ And then an administrator came in, told me a plane hit the building.”
Lutnick continued, “I started grabbing people as they were coming out [of the North Tower], asking what floor they were on. Because I knew there were lots of doors, there were probably 20 ways out of the building, and if one of my guys came out of this, then they were steaming out of all of them.”
The Commerce chief went on, “The highest floor I got to was 92, meaning someone told me they were on the 92nd floor. And then we heard this sound, the loudest sound I’ve ever heard in my life, I had no idea what it was.” The sound he heard was the South Tower collapsing.
Lutnick said that his main job is to “set the table” for Trump to come in and close deals. He was not bashful about doing precisely that for the E.U. agreement that enabled the president to finalize details in under two hours.
Describing Trump as a true negotiator, he stated, “He’s everything. He’s soft and hard, at the same meeting."
He continued, “He’s very kind and very warm and then very sharp and very hard. And says, ‘Look,’ in the middle of the EU meeting, he said, ‘All right, I guess we’re not going to get it done. We’ll just come back in a month or two, and we’ll do it then.’”
That willingness to walk away rather than take a bad deal is Trump’s trademark, and I have to admit, I often use it myself when seeking agreement with people. When they realize you are not going to cave, it generally works in your favor to get the better side of the deal. That is especially true when you are the one in a position of strength.
Lutnick revealed that Epstein was once his neighbor, and he told a rather sickening tale, explaining, “I say to him, ‘Massage table in the middle of your house? How often do you have a massage?' And he says, ‘Every day.’ And then he gets, like weirdly close to me, and he says, ‘And the right kind of massage.'”
He then explained, “They get a massage, that’s what his MO was. ‘Get a massage, get a massage,’ and what happened in that massage room, I assume, was on video. This guy was the greatest blackmailer ever, blackmailed people. That’s how he had money.”
I found that rather interesting because of the insistence of Attorney General Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel that there was no client list or any evidence of blackmail in the Epstein files.
Lutnick went on to say that he believes the reason Epstein got such a lenient result in Florida was because of tapes alleged to exist, but he was adamant in adding that it was only “his assumption.” Assumption or not, his direct interactions with Epstein are likely to revive the client list narrative, creating more problems for the Trump administration until all of the relevant documents are released.
