Howard Lutnick, Secretary of Commerce, laying it on thick there in an interview last year about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.

As you might have guessed—Lutnick was lying.

Like a rug.

Like a man who has never once paid a price for it.

Like a guy who thinks consequences are for suckers.

Impunity is the lifeblood of the Trump administration. It is the unspoken promise that comes with every appointment and every lie told by a Trump official: You will not be punished for this. Not for misleading Congress, not for abusing power, not for treating public office like a private hustle, not for shooting Americans in the streets of our country—just as long as you stay loyal to Donald Trump. In this administration, accountability is for chumps.

On Tuesday, Lutnick was forced under oath to admit that what he said in that interview—what he told the American people—was a lie.

Imagine, for a moment. that you were caught lying to the American people about your relationship with, of all people, Jeffrey Epstein, and then you were hauled before Congress to explain yourself. If you were a halfway decent person, you would, at the very least, express regret. But this is the Trump administration, and they don’t do regret, much less apologies. Brazen defiance of ordinary American decency is their hallmark. So Howard Lutnick went before Congress and sounded like an adolescent halfwit desperately hurling irrelevancies and non sequiturs at the adults in the room, insisting that when they heard him lie, he wasn’t really lying.

In normal times, a Cabinet secretary getting caught in a material lie to Congress would be a firing offense. In Trump’s Washington, it’s another day in the grift mines. Shamelessness pays off handsomely in Trump II.

No one is accusing Lutnick of participating in Epstein’s crimes. But in Washington, as the old saying goes, what’s truly scandalous isn’t what’s illegal, it’s what’s perfectly legal and goes on all the time.

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Lutnick’s name appeared in more than 250 documents in the Epstein files, according to The New York Times. And he wasn’t just visiting Epstein Island with his wife , children and nannies (plural).

In 2011, he had drinks at Epstein’s house, and apparently dinner afterwards with Woody Allen and his wife Soon-Yi Previn—three years after Epstein had been convicted of soliciting sex from a minor, and after reporters had uncovered many more allegations.

The following year, Lutnick went into business with Epstein. They planned to invest in an advertising technology firm—and the partnership papers were signed four days after Lutnick’s visit to Epstein’s island home. A message came from the convicted predator himself the next day: “Nice seeing you.”

And in 2017, Epstein donated $50,000 to a charitable event honoring Lutnick.

Remember how smug the Commerce Secretary was in that interview from last year? Watch that video again as he declares that—after meeting Epstein once—he swore he would have nothing to do with “that disgusting person” “socially, or for business, or even for philanthropy.”

He simply never dreamed those files would come out, the files that showed social, business, and philanthropic links to the disgusting person.

If the Epstein files are a reckoning—for the sex criminals certainly, but also for Howard Lutnick, and all the men like him who did business with Epstein, and cozied up to him, and flattered him, and protected him with their silence simply because he was rich and they hoped he could make them ever richer—that judgment day cannot come too soon. And let it sweep them all away, regardless of political party or fame or, especially, fortune.

—Terry