Email reveals the Lutnicks’ eagerness to visit Epstein’s island: ‘We would love to join you’
ALSO INSIDE: Private prison millionaire tapped to run ICE as detention expansion plans underway
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Private prison millionaire tapped to run ICE as detained population grows
A private prison executive has been selected by the Trump administration to lead Immigration and Customs Enforcement and spearhead efforts to mass-incarcerate thousands of immigrants per day.
The appointment of David Venturella is the Trump administration’s latest gift to his former employer, the private prison behemoth GEO Group, which has received more than $2 billion in no-bid contracts to provide nearly 30,000 beds for individuals abducted by ICE. Venturella’s role leading the Trump administration’s mass incarceration efforts will help streamline the process, providing massive profits for GEO Group at the expense of detainees’ basic human rights.
The lucrative contracts have proven GEO Group’s Trump 2024 campaign contributions — a little over $1.5 million — to be a massive return on investment. The influx of cash commitments from the federal government helped make 2025 the company’s most profitable year since its founding in 1984, according to Geo Group CEO George Zoley.
“Last year was the most successful period for new business wins in our company’s history,” Zoley told stockholders during a May earnings call.
Immigrants rights and prison reform groups believe Venturella’s appointment reflects the brazen extent the Trump administration is willing to go to in prioritizing profits above all else. Silky Shah, executive director of the Detention Watch Network, said this “revolving door” will only expedite the administration’s efforts to increase ICE’s prison capacity to more than 100,000.
“Venturella built his career on mass incarceration, including separating loved ones through detention and deportation, having previously worked at ICE during both the Bush and Obama administrations,” Shah said in a statement. “Like Tom Homan, Venturella’s intimate knowledge of ICE will likely yield another spike of ICE detention facility openings in the coming months as the agency operates with impunity and unprecedented funding.”
Public opposition over Trump’s anti-immigration efforts has increased dramatically since he took office in January 2025, as his agents have sexually abused detainees, killed protestors, and wreaked havoc on otherwise peaceful communities. Local resistance has successfully thwarted efforts to turn several industrial warehouses into prison camps, although several others are still in the works.
In an attempt to fly under the radar, ICE has also shifted tactics by using unmarked facilities as undisclosed detention sites. A review of ICE operations by COURIER identified 64 holding sites the agency has attempted to obscure from public view. Unlike traditional offices, these locations are unmarked buildings not listed in ICE’s online directories and can only be found using specific search terms. Even then, the listed information is often incorrect — for example, the Portland, Maine, office is described as the Boston Field Office.
Many of these sites are clustered around areas of heavy ICE activity, such as behind Home Depots or near airports used for deportation flights.
All 64 sites can be found here.
Similar to the fierce local backlash against warehouse detention proposals, community protests outside ICE’s unmarked facilities have begun to wear on ICE agents’ morale. Once it was discovered that an office space in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, was being used to hold immigrants — some as young as two years old — protests formed outside the building every month, according to TV9 reporter Jackson Valenti.
Eventually, the crowds grew large enough that agents felt uncomfortable, so they erected a fence to separate themselves. Undeterred, protestors have continued demonstrating, and the fence has since been turned into a memorial for individuals who have been killed in ICE custody.
Since day one of Trump’s political career, people have desperately attempted to normalize his absurd abuses of power and blatant corruption – and 10 years later, much of corporate media remains a victim of their own attempts to return to a sense of normalcy.
It’s time to stop sane-washing the insanity.
What Happened
The US Secretary of Commerce spent the majority of a four-hour interview with congressional investigators emphasizing the disdain he and his wife had for their former neighbor, Jeffrey Epstein — a claim wholly undermined by his spouse’s own words.
The House Oversight Committee asked Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to speak with them after a 2012 photo surfaced showing him with Epstein on the financier’s private island, a known hub of Epstein’s sex trafficking operation. During the deposition, Lutnick admitted that he briefly visited the island with his family, but was adamant that he and his wife, Allison — also a Trump appointee — had agreed when they first met Epstein to never establish a relationship with him.
“I had an informal conversation with my wife, and that’s what we discussed, and I would think that most people who are married would understand,” said Lutnick. “They have a conversation with their wife, that someone says something inappropriate, gross, gross, that when you leave with your wife, she says, ‘You should avoid that guy. He’s gross,’ right. And I did. So I don’t think that’s like — I think that’s kind of inconsequential, which means just avoid him, which I did.”
Throughout the deposition, Lutnick repeatedly pointed to his wife’s insistence that he avoid a personal or professional relationship with Epstein. But despite his insistence — Lutnick referenced his wife at least 50 times, almost always in connection to how they both found Epstein “gross” or “disgusting” — Allison’s correspondence with Epstein’s staff when coordinating their island visit tells a very different story.
“Hi Lesley. This is Allison Lutnick. We are looking forward to visiting you,” Allison wrote to Lesley Groff, Epstein’s personal assistant. “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. We would love to join you for lunch.”
The Lutnicks’ eager decision to sail a yacht full of minors to Epstein’s island came eight years after the couple says they agreed to avoid him and four years after Epstein registered in New York as a sex offender for soliciting an underage prostitute. At the time of the visit, Epstein was actively expanding his trafficking empire, according to documents released as part of the Epstein Files Transparency Act. In the weeks before and after the Lutnicks’ trip, Epstein was actively working with known accomplices to procure girls and manipulating women already under his control.
Allison’s apparent enthusiasm for spending part of her family’s winter holiday with Epstein pokes holes in her husband’s flimsy yet carefully crafted testimony before Congress. Throughout the four-hour deposition, Lutnick’s memory appears to begin and end where his name is mentioned in the Epstein Files. He vividly recalled writing exactly four emails to Epstein, claimed that their last communication was a 2018 correspondence included in the Files, and remembered only the portion of Epstein’s island shown in the released photograph.
Lutnick initially denied having any contact with Epstein after 2005, even after emails confirmed the 2012 island visit; it was only after the photograph of him there became public that his memory was apparently jogged. US Rep. James Walkinshaw (D-VA), a member of the Oversight Committee who questioned Lutnick, believes the Commerce Secretary had a personal and professional relationship with Epstein for years — far beyond what he disclosed to the committee.
“The most likely explanation here is that the visit to Epstein’s townhome when they, as neighbors, went over to visit — the entire story about Lutnick and his wife being, quote, grossed out by Epstein — it’s fabricated. I think that’s the logical explanation here, that Lutnick completely fabricated that original story after the fact, many years later, now, that Epstein is a liability,” Rep. Walkinshaw told COURIER. “It’s clear, based on that email and the other contact between Lutnick, Lutnick’s wife, and Epstein, and Epstein’s orbit, that there was a dialog and a relationship for many years — a friendly one, and they had no qualms about having a relationship and dialog with Jeffrey Epstein.”
The alleged fabrication is one of a series of misleading statements from individuals the Oversight Committee has interviewed as part of its investigation into the government’s lackluster case against Epstein. Earlier this year, close Epstein associates Richard Kahn and Darren Indyke claimed no knowledge of illegal activity — assertions disproved by numerous suspicious activity reports filed by Epstein’s financial institutions, as well as testimony from survivors.
While Oversight Chair Rep. James Comer (R-KY) said he would hold anyone caught lying to Congress accountable, no action has been taken against Kahn, Indyke, or Lutnick. In contrast, former US Attorney General Pam Bondi quickly reversed her plans to ignore the committee’s subpoena after ranking committee member Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA) filed contempt charges over her refusal to testify.
Comer, a close ally of President Donald Trump, has so far been resistant to any action that could anger the president, who has worked to oust members of Congress who continue to investigate Epstein. The cooperation between Comer and the White House may provide only temporary reprieve for the Lutnicks and others, however, if Democrats take control of the US House in the 2026 midterm elections.
“In a future Congress, we’ll be able to get Lutnick in, under oath on camera, to answer these questions again, because there’s no question he tried to slip out of the lies that he told publicly,” said Walkinshaw. “I don’t think there’s any scenario under which Chairman Comer and the Republicans would agree to that, given the lengths they went to to keep the Howard interview as under wraps and covered up as possible. I don’t think they would go along with bringing in Mrs. Lutnick, but I think all that’s got to be on the table. We can’t rule out talking to anybody who might have information that could advance our investigation.”
It’s easy for individual members of Congress to get overlooked by national outlets as they quietly skate to reelection again, and again, and again. The following is an overview of different congressional representatives you may not have heard of, with fun facts about their origin stories they’ve tried to keep out of the public narrative.
US Rep. Bryan Steil, Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District
Since taking office in 2019, Rep. Steil has:
Seen his net worth increase from $50,000 to $2 million
Condemned the Jan. 6 Insurrection
Voted against Trump’s impeachment over his incitement of said insurrection
Voted to codify same-sex marriage into law
Signed an amicus brief urging the US Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade
Hired an organizer in Arizona’s fake elector scheme to lead election oversight efforts
Fun Facts
Steil’s pre-political background is in manufacturing, but not as a blue collar worker. He spent nearly a decade as an industry executive and stayed aligned with management perspectives, opposing worker rights at every opportunity. He voted to limit access to trade labor jobs, defund the National Labor Relations Board, prohibit companies — like COURIER — from voluntarily recognizing their employees’ union, and voted against strengthening worker and union rights through the PRO Act.
Former Speaker Paul Ryan, now a Fox Corporation board member, gave Steil his first job in politics, and is often credited with molding him in his own likeness. Once a protégé, Steil has since been downgraded to bargain bin Ryan, as Wisconsin’s replacement policy wonk “has only a tiny fraction of the power and nowhere near the state and national name recognition that Ryan had.”
COURIER’s newly-launched Epstein investigation project
For too long, the Epstein Class has dealt in wealth, power, and politics to avoid accountability and deny victims & survivors their due justice. The public deserves the truth, but the Trump Administration is failing its legal obligation to deliver it.
That’s why we’re expanding our coverage to follow the money and investigate the power players in and outside the government. With a new database by Thorian AI, we have unprecedented access and ability to navigate more than 1.2M files and we’re sharing access—and what we’re finding—with you.
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