WASHINGTON — Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick exploded during an interview with congressional investigators when asked whether a mask in Jeffrey Epstein’s house was of his face.
He also repeatedly insisted he was merely “speculating” when he told The Post’s “Pod Force One” podcast that the now-deceased sex offender was “the greatest blackmailer ever,” according to a newly released transcript of his closed-door interview with Congress.
Lutnick appeared voluntarily earlier this month for the transcribed interview with the House Oversight Committee to answer questions about his interactions with Epstein — who was his next-door neighbor in Manhattan for more than a decade — after being threatened with a subpoena compelling his testimony.
The Cabinet official told The Post’s Miranda Devine in a podcast interview released Oct. 1, 2025, that he told his wife after the financier invited them over for coffee 20 years before — and gave them a tour of his Upper East Side mansion — that he would “never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again.”
But Lutnick later testified to Congress that he met with Epstein two more times, one of which involved a family visit to the money manager’s private island in the Caribbean, Little St. James.
Photos previously released by the Justice Department show that Epstein kept masks of unidentified male individuals on the wall of a room that contained a dentist’s chair — one of which bears a resemblance to Lutnick currently.
“The reason that we introduce this is many people online have speculated that one of the masks resembles you, specifically the one on the first page in the middle,” Oversight Chief Counsel for Investigations Jack Emmer told the commerce secretary, according to a transcript released Wednesday.
“What’s your response to these claims?” Emmer asked.
“You’ve got to be kidding me. That is the most ridiculous and absurd thing I’ve ever heard. What, a bald man? I have hair,” erupted Lutnick, who has exhibited some male-pattern baldness since the early 2000s.
“Look. I mean, I don’t have many, but at least I have some. That is not remotely me. That’s nonsense,” he pushed back.
Just before the interview concluded, Lutnick was asked whether he wanted to share anything else, to which he responded: “Just a small thing, which is that I didn’t grow a beard until after … this individual Epstein was dead.”
“So that mask that you showed me, I never had a beard before that,” he noted. Contemporaneous photos published in the Wall Street Journal and Telegraph show Lutnick did not sport facial hair in the 2000s or 2010s.
“And I never had a goatee either. So I just wanted to just say that these things are not possibly about me,” he added.
Elsewhere in the grilling, Lutnick said at least 10 times that he was “speculating” about Epstein’s “illegal activities” — including potentially blackmailing prominent individuals by forcing them into massages at his residences with — when he spoke on “Pod Force One” about the accused sex trafficker.
“He seemed to have a lot of money. That was why I was speculating,” he said in one exchange, while stressing at other points that he witnessed no “illegal conduct” and was not even aware Epstein had to register as a sex offender after pleading guilty to soliciting a minor for prostitution in 2008.
Lutnick also continued to deny that he was ever “in the room” with Epstein — despite testifying in a Senate hearing in February that he had two additional brief interactions with the man in the 2010s.
“It is accurate as to what I meant, which is I, Howard Lutnick, as a man, would not be in a situation with him because I felt him gross and inappropriate and not having boundaries; that I would not put myself in a room with him socially, which I did not, professionally, in business, which I did not, and philanthropically, which I did not,” he told House investigators.
Asked by Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) why he reversed the blackmail claims, Lutnick also answered, “Because there have been people from the administration who have all of the details who have said so, and I credit what they’ve said.”
Khanna expressed alarm at the about-face and later told reporters that he and Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) — who authored the law compelling DOJ disclosures on Epstein investigative materials — said he had “never seen a single public statement that there was no blackmail.”
When a Post reporter inquired whether the California Democrat read the DOJ’s July 2025 memo, which stated “[t]here was also no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions,” Khanna replied, “That is not what the survivors believe.”
The only odd comment Lutnick recalled he had already shared on the podcast, when Epstein showed off his massage table at his Manhattan penthouse and mentioned how often it was used.
“My best recollection is, he said, ‘Every day and the right kind of massage.’ And he said it to me, and my wife is standing next to me, and we looked at each other, and we left,” Lutnick recounted in the House interview.
The commerce secretary also said that he found it “unsettling and inexplicable” that Epstein’s aides were able to find out his family was sailing in the US Virgin Islands in 2012 — and reach out to him and his wife to set up a lunch.
“We sat outside, had lunch. It was boring. We left,” he added of the brief stop on Little St. James, noting that they did not tour the island but did briefly enjoy a view of the sea from a cliff.
In 2011, he said he also briefly spoke with Epstein in the financier’s foyer about scaffolding renovations.
