Trump Administration Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick admitted Tuesday that he and his family were in private island notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein years ago.

“I did have lunch with him in 2012 while I was on a boat for a family vacation,” Lutnick said in a 2012 article. Testify before Senate Appropriations Committee.

“My wife is with me, my four kids and the nanny,” he said. “I had another couple – they were there too, with their kids.”

“We did have lunch on the island for an hour,” he said.

“We left with all my kids, my nanny and my wife. We were on a family vacation,” he said.

The secretary of state’s admission comes as he faces bipartisan calls for his resignation as records reveal his business and personal ties to Epstein were more extensive than previously known.

Lutnick has previously said he cut ties with Epstein after 2005, several years before Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to a state charge of soliciting a minor for prostitution, which required him to register as a sex offender.

But an analysis of the latest batch of Epstein documents released by the Justice Department shows that Lutnick and Epstein did not communicate until years later.

December 2012, Epstein invites Lutnick to lunch Documents show he was on a private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The two men did business as recently as 2014, CBS News Report.

Epstein committed suicide in prison in 2019 while facing federal sex trafficking charges.

White House expressed confidence in Lutnick on Monday legislatorsSome, including Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., have called for him to step down.

After Lutnick’s testimony on Tuesday, press secretary Carolyn Leavitt told reporters at a White House briefing that the president Donald Trump Continue to support his business executive.

Testifying before the Appropriations Committee’s Commerce, Judiciary, Science and Related Agencies Subcommittee on Tuesday morning, Lutnick insisted that he had “almost no connection to that individual.”

“I’m pleased to be here to make it clear that I met Jeffrey Epstein when I moved to the house next door to his in New York,” the cabinet secretary testified.

“I met him twice more, I think twice, over the next 14 years,” Lutnick said. “Six years later, I met him, a year and a half later, I met him again, and then I never saw him again.”

“Maybe in total – and you’ve seen all these documents, out of millions of them – there are probably 10 emails linking me to him … over a 14-year period.”

“I have no relationship with him,” Lutnick said.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., the ranking member of the subcommittee, responded: “There is no indication that you personally engaged in any wrongdoing with Jeffrey Epstein. In fact, you … misled the country and Congress based on your previous statements suggesting that you severed all ties, when in fact you did not.”

When asked by Van Hollen if he had seen any inappropriate behavior during his visit to the island, Lutnick said he had not.

“The only people I saw while I was with my wife and children and another couple and their children were the staff working for Mr. Epstein on that island,” he testified.

Van Hollen asked Lutnick if he would commit to sharing his own records related to Epstein with Congress to “ensure the integrity of the file.”

“I’m definitely going to talk about that. There’s no thought of that,” Lutnick said, adding, “I have nothing to hide. Absolutely nothing.”