Poor Howard Lutnick cannot catch a break. Since becoming Donald Trump’s Commerce secretary last year, he’s received blowback for telling Fox News viewers to buy Tesla stock (while Elon Musk was working for the government); implementing a contract-approval process at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that resulted in website crashes and toilet paper shortages; and saying that the new American Dream is to work in a factory for the rest of your life — and for your children and grandchildren to work there, too. In May, he was forced to sit for a closed-door interview with the House Oversight Committee to answer questions about his name appearing in the Epstein files more than 250 times and why he said he hadn’t seen the disgraced financier since 2005 despite actually visiting Epstein’s island in 2012. (He also got flak for making a $5 million donation to a super-PAC that supports House Republicans in the weeks leading up to the interview.)
And now Democratic lawmakers are out here suggesting that it’s a conflict of interest and maybe even the definition of corruption for the Commerce Department to pay $1.6 billion for a stake in a rare-earth-metal producing company when it turns out that one of the terms of the agreement was for said company to raise private capital and that the private capital was raised by the financial-services firm majority-owned by Lutnick’s children and run by two of his sons.
