Dr. Mehmet Oz, the 65-year-old television personality now serving as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, sent an email alongside his wife, Lisa, inviting convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to a Valentine's Day party at his Palm Beach residence in 2016. The invitation surfaced in a document recently published by the Department of Justice as part of the broader release of Epstein-related files.
The email was not an isolated exchange. DOJ records show several message exchanges between Oz and Epstein spanning from 2012 to 2016, years after Epstein had already been convicted of soliciting a minor for prostitution in Florida and was a registered sex offender. Another email between the two, dated January 1, 2016, was described as completely illegible due to encryption.
CMS did not return a request for comment.
According to the Daily Mail, Oz is not the only senior official whose ties to Epstein have drawn scrutiny in recent days. Department of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick testified this week on Capitol Hill before the Senate Commerce Committee about his own connections to Epstein. Lutnick had previously told the New York Post last year that he cut ties with Epstein after first meeting him in 2005, saying he was too unsettled by Epstein and would quote:
will never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again.
New files tell a different story. Records show Lutnick and his family visited Epstein's island in 2012 — seven years after the encounter Lutnick described as so disturbing he severed all contact. Lutnick has characterized the island visit as a stop for lunch while his family was sailing by on vacation.
Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen, a member of the Senate Commerce Committee, seized on the discrepancy:
You misled the country and the Congress based on your earlier statements suggesting that you cut off all contact when in fact you had not.
Van Hollen isn't wrong about the timeline problem. You don't sail casually to the island of a man you swore off seven years earlier and call it a coincidence. Whether Lutnick's explanation holds up will depend on whether anyone in Washington is interested in pressing further — and whether the answer matters to those who already made up their minds.
President Trump was asked about Lutnick's island visit and said plainly that he had no prior knowledge of it:
No, I wasn't aware of it.
I actually haven't spoken to him about it, but from what I hear, he was there with his wife and children.
Trump's name appears hundreds of times in the Epstein files, though no context for those mentions has been provided in the released documents covered here. A photograph from February 12, 2000, shows Trump and then-girlfriend Melania Knauss alongside Epstein and British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell at Mar-a-Lago — a picture that has circulated for years and predates Epstein's criminal conviction.
The Epstein files name a sprawling cast. Bill Clinton, Elon Musk, and scores more appear alongside Oz and Lutnick. The sheer breadth of Epstein's social network — reaching into finance, media, entertainment, and both political parties — is precisely what makes the whole affair so corrosive to public trust. Epstein moved through elite circles with the ease of a man who understood that access was its own currency.
What makes the Oz revelation particularly uncomfortable is the timeline. This was not a cocktail party encounter from the 1990s, before Epstein's crimes were public knowledge. The Valentine's Day invitation was sent in 2016. By then, Epstein was a registered sex offender. His conviction was a matter of public record. His reputation was not ambiguous.
The same applies to Lutnick's 2012 island visit. The defense that powerful people routinely crossed paths with Epstein before anyone knew better expired sometime around his Florida conviction. After that, proximity was a choice.
Conservatives who cheered the release of the Epstein files — rightly — as a long-overdue act of transparency cannot now flinch when the names that surface are politically inconvenient. The entire point of sunlight is that it reaches every corner. If the standard is that Epstein's network of enablers and associates must be exposed regardless of party, that standard doesn't bend because someone you appointed is on the list.
Oz has said nothing publicly. An encrypted email from New Year's Day 2016 remains illegible. The nature of his relationship with Epstein beyond these email exchanges is unknown — the documents don't indicate whether Epstein ever attended the party, and no further details about the content of their correspondence have been released.
But silence has a shelf life. The files are public now. The invitation exists. And the question isn't whether Oz knew who Epstein was in 2016 — everyone did. The question is why that didn't matter.
