Who Was Howard Lutnick’s Valentine?
Epstein was the ‘greatest blackmailer ever,” you say?
Last Tuesday, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick testified before the Senate appropriations committee. The topic was supposed to be broadband, but it didn’t take five minutes for MD’s Chris Van Hollen to broach an even more boring one: how Lutnick, Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime neighbor, just got stone-cold bald-faced busted in the Epstein files lying about having ZERO contact with the dead pedo beyond that ONE AND DONE time in 2005 when he said he and his wife met him as their new neighbor, got immediately creeped out by his leering talk of massages, and ran out of there toot sweet like ick ack GUH-ROSS, cooties!
But what do you know, turns out Lutick and Epstein actually had many phone calls and meetup plans, including long after Epstein’s first kid-diddling felonies and all the way up until 2018. The two were even in business together at one point, acquiring stakes in a web-advertising company called Adfin in December of 2012.
What more, the files show that four days before the two signed the Adfin deal, Lutnick and wife Allison sailed for luncheon on Little-Girl-Sex-Trafficking Island on their yacht, along with their nannies, four other adult guests, and the four Lutnick children: three boys and then- nine-year-old daughter Casey. Parents of the year! Stand-ins for the working class man!
“This is Allison Lutnick,” reads an email to Epstein’s assistant Lesley Groff. “We will be coming from Caneel Bay in the morning. We are a crowd...2 families each with 4 kids ranging in age from 7-16! 6 boys and 2 girls. I hope that’s okay.”
Then on Dec. 24, 2012, Epstein sent an email to his assistant: “please forward to howard lutnik: Nice seeing you.”
DERP!
Hyuk, now Lutnick has no recollection of why he might have gone there. And strange how he specifies that he left with the nannies and kids, as if there were potentially other options available.
The Lutnicks weren’t the only adults bringing Epstein around their children. Some even encouraged relationships with them, like Epstein’s JP Morgan Chase banker Jes “Snow White” Staley, who introduced Epstein to his own college-age daughter and asked Epstein to help her make job connections in the science world. Staley’s daughter even came to call Epstein “Uncle Jeffrey,” and invited him to her college graduation, and then father Staley used Epstein’s friendship with his daughter to help nudge along up his own personal connection and communications with Epstein.
Or Andrew and Fergie hosting Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, Harvey Weinstein at daughter Beatrice’s masked ball 18th birthday party in 2006, two months after a US arrest warrant had been issued for Epstein for the sexual assault of a minor, and eight days before he was arrested. EYES WIDE NOPE. Imagine being a teenaged peer of Beatrice’s, getting all dressed up in a beautiful costume for romantic dances with Prince Charmings, but it’s your friend’s dad and their old creep friends in masks honking your ass and guiding your hand to their groins. Where were all the other adults in the room?
Or the Dubins; Eva Andersson-Dubin was Epstein’s girlfriend before Maxwell, and her new husband Glenn invested with Epstein. Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre testified that husband Glenn was the first man Maxwell pimped her out to, and the Andersson-Dubins’ chef and wife, Renaldo and Debra Rizzo testified in a 2016 deposition about talking to a frightened 15-year-old Swedish girl at the Dubins’ house who told him that Maxwell had taken her passport and taken her to sex island, and then later the girl got a job as the Dubins’ nanny.
From Vanity Fair:
Rizzo testified that in late 2004 or early 2005, Andersson-Dubin told the unnamed girl to sit on a barstool in the kitchen. She seemed to be “distraught” and “upset,” Rizzo said, “and she was shaking.” She didn’t want to talk, her head was down, and Rizzo thought she was “on the verge of crying.” According to the deposition, the girl told him and his wife that she worked for Epstein as his “executive personal assistant,” and when Rizzo expressed shock that such a young girl could have that job, “she just breaks down hysterically.” Rizzo stated that the girl told him she was involved in some forced sexual activity at Epstein’s Caribbean island and was told by Maxwell and Epstein not to discuss it. Rizzo said he and his wife were dumbfounded. “We hear people approach and she just shuts up,” Rizzo testified. “Eva comes in and tells her that she will be working for Eva in the city as a nanny.”
But about a month later, according to Rizzo, the Dubins, along with the girl and the Rizzos, were on Dubin’s private jet back to Sweden and the girl was returned home.
And that was the last anybody heard about that. “Modeling,” “nannying,” “massages,” “personal assistant,” it all meant the same thing.
Anyway more than once fucking Lutnick has stood behind Trump LAUGHING, just cracking up, when reporters ask about the Epstein Files.
What part of a THOUSAND sex trafficking victims is funny to you, sir? Nervous laughter? Edibles kicking in? Aghast at the balls? Out of fucks realizing there is no exit, his image now as destroyed among decent folk as a pair of Alan Dershowitz’s Fruit of the Looms?
Trade a trillion in bonds, you’re the bond king. Get OJ off, you’re king of the lawyers. But a guy goes to kid-diddler island one time…
Or maybe his laugh is simply a beyond-Patrick Bateman level lack of self-awareness, so devoid of empathy and understanding of human feelings that he doesn’t believe others have it, and assumes everyone else’s empathy is as performative as his is. That would track with the crowd he runs with.
Epstein connections or not, one thing ALL of Trump’s complicit toadies have is a disdain for empathy. Dead dogs, raped children, starved children, there is nothing you could put in their faces they would give one fuck about, unless it personally affects them somehow. Pam Bondi’s stock portfolio is up, so it’s downright offensive to suggest she should give one turd about any other thing on God’s green earth! Think of the children, how dare you not think about her bank account?
Like Bondi, and Noem, Lutnick is a special kind of cold. In 1996 he wrestled control of the bond trading firm Cantor Fitzgerald from B. Gerald Cantor as he lay dying, then sued his widow Iris out of her remaining share.
And on 9/11 Howard survived by luckily going in to work late that day. Then he got on TV and tearfully pledged to help the families, but days later on September 15 he cut all of the New York employees off of the payroll with no notice, even ones who were still missing and had not yet been officially declared dead, leaving survivors scrambling. After the bad PR, the company did end up paying out an average of $273k over five years to each victim’s surviving family members, and providing other assistance. But it also took plenty in government and insurance money itself.
As Ghislaine Maxwell pointed out, all Epstein’s man friends could have gotten pussy anywhere. And they could have gotten investment money or connections somewhere else too, none were scrubs. Epstein didn’t need Lutnick to spot him cash for to invest in some web ad company or vice-versa, and what did either of them know about B2B web ad placement?
The value Epstein added wasn’t investment and sexual services on pervert Pleasure Island. The real draw and what kept his man-friends coming back and bringing their friends too was he played their confessor, therapist, enabler, encouraging dad they never had, but encouraging their most gross and antisocial impulses for his own gain. Epstein was the original toxic-manosphere influencer!
What the men craved as much as anything was Epstein’s reassurance that they were not horrible, perverted people for doing horrible, perverted things, that there was nothing weird about, say, fantasizing about having sex with Ethiopian girls and then shooting them afterwards if you were Steve Bannon, or screwing over a widow, sexually harassing a student at your college, whatever. And Epstein kept all the receipts, so, just imagine what’s in the 3 million files we haven’t seen!
No wonder everyone in Trump’s orbit starts sweating, laughing, and/or screaming when Epstein’s name comes up. Lutnick knows full well what else might be in there.
Everyone’s tense but Trump, that is. Child rape in the Caribbean, it’s irie!
He doesn’t read, but he’s sure there are no headlines about any of that stuff, it’s all fine! The one thing he does know, the DOJ released hundreds of victims’ names or identifying information, and now people are mad they’re releasing TOO MUCH. Women, you never can please ‘em! First they want one thing, then the opposite, amirite? Can’t they just smile more?
Maybe that’s the advice Trump gave to Lutnick. Turn that frown upside down!
Hope everybody had Happy Valentine’s Day anyway, everybody but those guys. 💘
[PBS]
Support Wonkette’s work so we can keep doing more of it.






I am unable to comment beyond dropping this off, as I don't want to violate Rules for Radicals. But this needs to circulate:
A huge revelation in Epstein files documents unearthed by investigative reporter Roger Sollenberger: “Maybe the biggest story in the country here. The FBI DID interview a victim who credibly accused Trump of sexual assault, according to Epstein file documents, undermining claims that Trump has not been accused of wrongdoing. It’s unclear what became of the investigation. The interview was conducted July 24, 2019, and entered into the FBI’s case files on Aug 9, the day before Epstein was found dead in his jail cell.”
https://www.meidasplus.com/p/this-weekend-in-politics-bulletin-ead?r=9qw74&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true
I totally forgot to add this to the movie post.
Smart people looked at the question.
"So, what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?
“Monty Python and the Holy Grail”, released in 1975, continues to amuse millions of fans today. But, for fans, one question from the movie often provokes discussion – “What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?”
"Monty Python and the Holy Grail: Airspeed Velocity of an Unladen Swallow
It’s time we finally had an answer to this famous question. However, the answer is not as simple as you might initially believe. Here’s why."
https://interestingengineering.com/science/monty-python-and-the-holy-grail-airspeed-velocity-of-an-unladen-swallow