Welcome to The Beat. I'm Ari Melbert, and this Epstein scandal is rocking the Trump White House again today, this time featuring confirmed visits to the notorious Epstein Island, where the man you see on your screen, along with the president, Trump's commerce chief, visited a confession he made for the first time today, after many years of lying about it.

There are several strands this story we'll get into, but we begin with really something right out of a movie plot.

And we've been reporting on this.

If it sounds familiar, you may remember the evidence in the timeline that we've been showing you.

What you see on the timeline includes Mr. Ludnik,

who had said that he cut off all contact with Epstein,

all contact.

Dinners in New York, emails, what have you.

And you see there later, Epstein talked about blackmail. So he was accusing this man he said he

had cut off all contact with of blackmail, something that Pam Bondi and others inside DOJ say

still didn't happen. And yet those three million new files that you see on the far right part of our

timeline included Lutnik emailing about visiting the island, which put a lot

of pressure on his public denials. And today, what we've been tracking here and what so many in

Congress, of course, and independent investigators and journalists have been tracking, has now

blown up in Mr. Lutnik's face in the White House. Lutnik confessing only now that he's under oath today, faced with the damning emails that we've reported that we told you about, that others, including the survivors, demanded to be released precisely because they didn't believe people like Mr. Lutnik, who made a big show of both denying any past contact with Epstein, having cut off contact,

he said, and still talking about him. And I'll show you about some of what he said,

because it fits into the larger question about how high this goes in the United States government.

These are also files and emails that President Trump has tried to hide for years.

And so while there might be a kind of dramatic or some would even say

purian interest in some of this, believe me, honest law enforcement prosecutors to say nothing of the

survivors care a lot about why these lies go to the top of the Trump administration. And even today,

there's no accountability apparently. Donald Trump standing by

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