Will Creepy Epstein Emails Be the End of Larry Summers?
Few of the many rich, powerful, and famous friends of Jeffrey Epstein have faced serious repercussions for their long and tangled connections to the accused sex trafficker; one, in fact, is the president. Larry Summers is not so fortunate.
Last week’s release of a massive tranche of emails by a House committee has put Epstein’s closest friendships in clearer focus, including his long-running correspondence with Summers, who served as the president of Harvard, as the Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton, and as an adviser to Barack Obama during the financial crisis. It’s been known for more than two decades that Summers and Epstein had a close friendship, one of several ties to Harvard that the late sex trafficker developed. Despite this relationship, Summers has maintained a number of positions at top American institutions, including a professorship at Harvard and a seat on OpenAI’s board, and made semi-frequent guest contributions to the New York Times “Opinion” section.
The latest email dump could threaten his standing. Correspondence between Epstein and Summers showed that they chatted frequently, with Epstein referring to himself as Summers’s “wing man” for apparent relationships outside his marriage. The two were even sending messages up until the day before Epstein’s arrest in July 2019.
Summers’s embarrassing emails asking Epstein for extramarital-dating advice are among the most-shared documents from the thousands of pages released by the House so far. Messages found by the Harvard Crimson show how Summers asked his friend for advice on trying to date an apparent mentee. “She must be very confused or maybe wants to cut me off but wants professional connection a lot and so holds to it,” he wrote in March 2019. In a later message, Summers forwarded an email in which the woman asked for advice on a paper. Summers said to Epstein that it was “probably appropriate” to wait on responding. “She’s already begining to sound needy :) nice,” he wrote back.
With this new information, institutions are facing calls to terminate their relationships with Summers. Government watchdogs are urging him to step down from all public-facing positions, including his role at the Center for American Progress, the liberal think tank, which has reportedly tasked him with building out the economic policies of their Project 2029 outline for a Democratic presidential campaign.
So far, the most prominent call has come from Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, a former Harvard professor. “For decades, Larry Summers has demonstrated his attraction to serving the wealthy and well-connected, but his willingness to cozy up to a convicted sex offender demonstrates monumentally bad judgment,” Warren told CNN on Monday. “If he had so little ability to distance himself from Jeffrey Epstein even after all that was publicly known about Epstein’s sex offenses involving underage girls, then Summers cannot be trusted to advise our nation’s politicians, policymakers, and institutions — or teach a generation of students at Harvard or anywhere else.”
None of the institutions connected to Summers have taken action as of the Monday after the big email release. But at least one, the Center for American Progress, told CNN that it had begun a review of “last week’s disclosures to determine appropriate next steps.” In a statement to the Harvard Crimson, Summers apologized for his yearslong relationship with the infamous sex criminal. “I have great regrets in my life,” he wrote. “As I have said before, my association with Jeffrey Epstein was a major error of judgement.” In an op-ed on Sunday, the Crimson editorial board called for the university to reopen its investigation into Epstein’s Harvard connections — beyond just its former president.