David Dee Delgado | Getty Images
Rep. Nancy Mace on Friday said that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick should testify to the House Oversight Committee to answer questions about his association with notorious sex predator Jeffrey Epstein.
"Howard Lutnick should take questions from the Oversight committee," Mace, R-S.C., said in an X post on Friday morning.
Mace's tweet responded to an X post that said the Department of Justice had removed from its database of Epstein-related documents a photo of Epstein standing in front of a man who "appears to be Howard Lutnick."
It is not known when the photo, which since has been restored to the DOJ's public database, was taken.
Source: Epstein Files | DOJ
But it appears to include, in addition to Epstein, Lutnick and his friend Michael Lehrman, who other documents in the DOJ's database indicated was vacationing with Lutnick and his family when they all visited Epstein for lunch on his private island in December 2012.
Lutnick has not been accused of wrongdoing in connection with Epstein.
Mace later Friday morning told reporters, "I will be asking" Lutnick to testify to the Oversight committee.
Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., separately told reporters that he believed there would be enough votes on the committee to subpoena Lutnick to testify.
The lawmakers' comments came before that panel was set to question former President Bill Clinton in a deposition about his connections to Epstein in Chappaqua, New York.
Clinton's wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, was deposed about Epstein on Thursday. She told reporters later that she testified she did not recall ever meeting Epstein, and that she had no knowledge of his crimes.
House Oversight Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., on Thursday told reporters that it is "very possible" that the panel will subpoena Lutnick to testify.
Comer has not called President Donald Trump to testify.
Trump, who had a longtime friendship with Epstein before the two men fell out in the early 2000s, has said that the recently released files on Epstein by the DOJ exonerate him of any wrongdoing.
MS Now reported earlier this week that the DOJ withheld from public disclosure memos and notes about FBI interviews, including those of a woman who has alleged that Trump sexually abused her when she was a minor.
The DOJ, in response to that and other similar reporters, had said, "If files are temporarily pulled for victim redactions or to redact Personally Identifiable Information, then those documents are promptly restored online and are publicly available."
Lutnick, in testimony on Feb. 10, to the Senate Appropriations Committee, admitted that he and his family had lunch with Epstein in December 2012 at Epstein's private island in the Caribbean.
Elizabeth Frantz | Reuters
Lutnick's testimony came after he had claimed that he cut off contact with his New York City neighbor Epstein in 2005, three years before Epstein pleaded guilty in Florida state court to soliciting prostitution from an underage girl.
DOJ files show that Lutnick remained in communication with Epstein years later.
MS Now reported on Feb. 10 that, "In 2015, Lutnick appeared to invite Epstein to an 'intimate' fundraising event for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, which Lutnick had been fundraising for at the time."
"In 2017, Epstein donated $50,000 to a New York charity in honor of Lutnick, according to the files," MS Now reported.
Documents also indicate that Epstein and Lutnick "each signed on behalf of limited liability companies that agreed on Dec. 28, 2012, to acquire stakes in a now-shuttered advertising technology company called Adfin," CBS News reported previously.
Epstein died from a jailhouse suicide in August 2019, weeks after being arrested on federal child sex trafficking charges.
