Bulwark Takes - WILD Interview! Lutnick Shatters Trump's Epstein Party Line

Episode Date: October 2, 2025

Andrew Egger and Will Sommer talk about the latest "foot in mouth" moment from Howard Lutnick: going against the Trump story on Epstein and revealing another link from the Trump inner circle to Epstein himself.

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Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. But MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hi, I'm Andrew Eger with the bulwark. I've got some weird new stuff to discuss in the ongoing, never-ending, apparently story of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Here to discuss it is my bulwark colleague and right-wing media whisperer Will Summer. It's a classic Howard Lutnik foot-in-the-mouth moment. I'm happy to be here.

Yeah, we get these so often, right? It's a good day. So let's start with the kind of pre-existing line here, right? The White House has been saying for a while that as far as they know, according to all the evidence the Justice Department has, Jeffrey Epstein was not actually involving other high profile powerful people in his abuse of underage girls that was going on for years and for which he ultimately went to prison and ultimately apparently killed himself. This is what FBI director Cash Patel had to say about that last month before the Senate Judiciary Committee. There is no credible information. None. If there were, I would bring the case yesterday.

Now, I think we have all been interested to see that that's the line the White House is rolling with, right? It's been interesting to see them all say, nothing to see here, nothing to see here, nothing to see here. Obviously, a lot of Epstein's victims have accused other prominent people of participating in their abuse along with Jeffrey Epstein. There are a lot of outstanding questions about how he got his money and, you know, why he had, why he was rubbing shoulders with all these rich and powerful people. Among those people, among the people who apparently are not particularly satisfied with the White House's version of events here is the Commerce Secretary of the United States, Howard Howard Lutnik,

who showed up on a podcast yesterday, New York Post podcast. By the way, New York Post, please stop horning in on our territory with these video podcasts. We do not go to New York and print off, you know, broadsheet tabloids and put them around town. You do your thing. our thing. The Commerce Secretary was on this podcast, and he was asked about his own prior connection to Jeffrey Epstein. I actually, Will, I did not know that these guys had such an interesting

personal history. Why don't we start there? What is it? What's the Howard Lettnick experience when it comes to Jeffrey Epstein? Like so many in the Trump administration, Howard Lutnik had a relationship, albeit perhaps a distant one with Jeffrey Epstein. They were neighbors at one point. Lutnik says he went over to Epstein's house and got kind of creeped out by the massage table. And he said, you know what? Let's not hang out with this guy anymore. I mean, that's how he relates. But he certainly appears to have been, you know, in his own telling, sort of at least somewhat, you know, socially familiar with him.

Yeah, I did not realize that the thing that was so crazy to me is he talks about how they were literally next door neighbors, right? He says, he says, we shared a wall while they were both living living in New York. And it appears, I mean, when, when, when, when he narrates this story to the, to the post. it's very clear in his telling that, like, they were not close, right? That when they became neighbors, Epstein had him over to his place one time. And then, and he was so creeped out by the way the whole thing went. He said, you know, they had this massage table just like in the living room, right? Like where ordinary people would just be like hanging out, right?

And, and he narrates that Epstein came up to, or came very close to him. and is like, yeah, I get a massage every day and I get the right kind of massage. And Howard Lutnik and his wife are just standing there like, cool, man. This is a, this is a, this is a most social and sanitizer, perhaps, yeah. The whole story of Jeffrey Epstein is full of these things, right? And you mentioned it a second ago. Like, he really was like just very much a, a mainstay of this whole kind of like New York social scene for a long time, right?

Yeah, I mean, look, I mean, New York Magazine wrote about him in 2002 way before even the first pedophile accusations, you know, made it to law enforcement. And they said, like, who's this guy who's so rich and how did he get so rich and how does he know everyone? So, I mean, I guess it's not surprising that Howard Lutnik as another rich New York guy would have a connection to him. But I do think it's interesting here how, you know, as someone plugged into that milieu, he then goes on to obliterate the administration's line on Epstein. Right, right, right. Yeah, we're burying the lead here a little bit. Like, let's just play this clip because this is crazy that he that he comes out and says this as another cabinet official in this White House. That's what his M.O. was, you know, 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. Blackmail people. That's how he had money. So what happened to those videos? Why is they now such a dearth of information when, you know, Donald Trump's people are running the FBI and the DOJ? I assume way back when they traded those videos in exchange for him getting that 18 months. to allow him to have visits and be out of jail. I mean, he's a serial sex offender. How could he get 18 months and be able to go to his office during the day and have visitors and stuff?

It must have been a trade. Just to put these things side by side, right? Cash Patel, the basic argument here, and this is the kind of great unanswered question about Jeffrey Epstein. He's like, we know he had all these relationships with, you know, the jet set crew. And we also know that he had this horrible life abusing underage girls trafficking them, you know, all this stuff, all this stuff that everybody knows by now.

And the big outstanding question that has never been resolved to anybody's satisfaction is how much did those lives crossover, right? How much did they coincide? Was he just like this crazy finance guy who had this like horrible secret side of his life? or was the horrible secret side of his life, part of his attraction to sort of like the elite set that he ran with. And the White House line has always been very much, or at least, you know, since Trump's re-election,

since this was a story they wanted to put to bed, very much the totally separate, nothing to see here, it's over and done with. Letnik, again, he's speaking in his personal capacity here. He's just kind of sharing his own thoughts, but he makes it sound like from the minute he met Jeffrey Epstein, it was obvious and apparent that Epstein was, you know, a total sex pest and a total creep and was like kind of like leading with that while meeting other

prominent members of the of you know of the of the of the of the of the new york elite the new york financial elite and then he like gets like weirdly close to me oh and he says and the right kind of massage now my wife is standing here so she looks at me and i look at her and we say i'm sorry we have to go And we left. And in the six or eight steps it takes to get from his house to my house, my wife and I decided that I will never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again. Lutnik here is making clear that, you know, I don't think I personally wouldn't consider Howard Lutnik like a Sherlock Holmes level sleuth or, you know, like this guy who can really

deduce things others can't see. And yet he's like, oh, yeah, you know, he's like, here's my car. creepy old massage table. Welcome to my house. It's right in the living room. So, you know, I mean, in the same way, this harkens back to, you know, Trump's birthday letter, you know, saying, like, you know, we love secrets, you know, I, I, I, or Trump's remark, Jeffrey likes his women very young, you know, this kind of thing. And so in this case, the idea that Lutnik says, yeah, like Jeffrey was blackmailing women or I would assume. And I think, um, he had all these videos of people. I mean, this goes right against what the White House and the DOJ line has been this whole time. Yeah, yeah. And again,

just to dwell on that, because like any one of these, like, clips that we have have known, that have been kind of a matter of the public record now forever, you know, Trump talking about liking the women on the young side or, or, you know, who the heck knows? Like, there are, there are 500 of these, like, weird little things. Or like, you go back to the, all of the weird smoke around Jeffrey Epstein's original plea deal when he got off incredibly light in 2008, when it was thought that they were going to be bringing federal charges against him for for you know these accusations of of sex crimes with underage girls got a slap on the wrist sentence from a guy who went on to be a cabinet secretary in Trump's

first term Alex Acosta I mean it's just this stuff just piles up right and now you have you know here this guy a cabinet secretary for Donald Trump now a former next door neighbor of Jeffrey Epstein who's saying yeah you know from from the second we met obvious sex pest he was he was blending these two sides of his life completely. And it's my opinion that this is how he made his money is by blackmailing famous wealthy people after talking them into getting, you know, creepy, you know, untoward massages in my, in his living room. I mean, it's just, it's all right out there, right?

The funniest thing about this clip to me came right at the end of it when, when the, the post reporter who like is plainly sort of like, wow, these are some wild things. that the Commerce Secretary is throwing around, she kind of asked him, have you, have you shared your perspective, your theory, your experiences with the president about this? And he kind of, he kind of goes into like immediate, like, wait a minute, I'm kind of talking out of turn mode. And he's sort of like, ah, yeah, well, you know, the president knows that I wasn't, I wasn't a big fan of the guy. But, but, you know, he has so much stuff going on. He has so much stuff on his plate. And this, these are all sort of distractions. And it's funny to see him kind of like snap back out of like

fun story time with Howard mode. back into wait, there's like a White House narrative that I need to keep standing up here. Well, I mean, it's really crazy what he's saying. I mean, he says that Epstein was filming, you know, people he was providing underage girls to, right? And something the Justice Department has said is not true. And he says, well, I think Epstein got this sweetheart plea deal, which by the way, was arranged by Alex Acosta, who went on to be in the Trump administration, in exchange for the pedophile tapes. Now, The government, that means the government is covering up, you know, these videos of other people who are, who are, you know, having sex with underage girls.

And also is like, okay, like that, in order to cover that up, let's give you the deal. I mean, that is really, that's a crazy allegation. And as we said, I mean, it goes completely against what the Justice Department is saying. If anything, I mean, that's like, you should be on Info Wars, right? I mean, that level, like, that's something that's like way beyond what a lot of people are saying. And so that that idea is just really wild. And then, you know, he's just going to say, oh, well, you know, never mind. You know, maybe I've said too much.

Yeah. And look, we should note, like, we've been talking a lot about these allegations that Leibnick is making. He is not really in a position to, like, have insider knowledge about this stuff, you know, like, and to the same degree that, like, Cash Patel is or, you know, the FBI or various people in the DOJ. I mean, that's obviously not Lettnik's role as Commerce Secretary. So he is sort of coming at this story from outside, again, as, like, like a former neighbor of Epstein's and as a pundit, right? So it's, I, I, it is in one sense, you know, the White House like contradicting its own story horribly. In another sense,

it's not like, I mean, I don't expect the judiciary committee to like drag Cash Patel back and wave this interview in his face and be like, well, you see, you see, you know, caught in the act, the smoking gun. But it's crazy. It's crazy that he's saying these things. And it does really just underscore how implausible the, the White House's case has been. Because, because here's a guy, you know, again, just talking from his own lived experience of having shared a wall once upon a time with Jeffrey Epstein and having supposedly been sort of enthusiastically talked to about unsavory massage activity that was taking place on the other side of that wall, so much so that he and his wife, like, immediately made a U-turn.

And he says, you know, we would, we would like never be seen with him again, you know, for, we wouldn't do professional events with him. We wouldn't do, you know, we wouldn't go to philanthropic stuff that he was at. I mean, this is what Lutnik says. It's interesting. I mean, Donald Trump did not have the same, the same sort of knee-jerk reaction to Jeffrey Epstein that Howard Lutnik, his commerce secretary seems to have had. Anything else we should say about this stuff, Will, before we, before we, I think that's it. I mean, it's a classic, you know, Lutnik blunder.

You know, famously he said, you know, you might not get your social security check this week, but who would miss that. And so, you know, he just loves sticking his foot in his mouth in ways that I think are disadvantageous for the administration. Yep, this Epstein story is going to keep rolling. We're going to get a discharge petition out of the House of Representatives in theory in the near future here. So we will keep an eye on it. It just keeps burning, just keeps going, keeps being new stuff to say about it.

So thanks, Will, for coming on to talk about the whole thing. Thanks to all of you guys out there in TV land for watching, listening, however you consume this, whether it's on YouTube, whether it's on our website. Thanks for doing that. If you are on YouTube, you should consider heading over to the bulwark.com, checking out our stuff, get Will's newsletter, get my newsletter, get 50 other newsletters and podcasts and stuff we put up on the website, it's all good, as well as we hope you will subscribe to the channel if you aren't yet. Thanks for watching. We will see you all next time.