Disclosed Communications Depict Epstein and Summers as Trusted Friends

Numerous exchanges between convicted sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein and one-time US finance chief Larry Summers were released this week, showing the pair acted as confidants.

Their correspondence, spanning 2013 to early 2019, reveal the two men discussing private – and at times unseemly – opinions on public affairs and personal connections.

“I’m trying to figure why [the] American elite think if u murder your baby by violence and abandonment it must be irrelevant to your acceptance to Harvard,”|“I’m trying to|I am attempting to|I'm struggling to} understand why [the] American elite feel if u kill your baby by beating and neglect it must be unimportant to your acceptance to Harvard,”} Summers emailed to Epstein in a 2017 email. Yet flirted with a few women 10 years ago and are unable to work at a network or think tank. DO NOT SHARE THIS OBSERVATION.”

During that period, Harvard University was dealing with an enrollment controversy after a once incarcerated woman’s acceptance to a PhD program. Summers, a former president of the university who lost his position amid a uproar after making discriminatory comments about women in academia, added in the email to Epstein: “I observed that half of the IQ in [the] world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 percent of population.”

Summers was once a leading light in liberal circles – a one-time treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, one of the primary designers of Barack Obama’s approach to the financial crisis, and a committed voice in the liberal commentariat. But concerns have remained about his connection with Epstein, a longtime connection of Donald Trump. Epstein was alleged to have run a broad sex trafficking of minors operation before his passing in jail in 2019 in New York City.

Following the release of a earlier tranche of emails between Epstein and Summers in a 2023 article, a agent for Summers commented that he “deeply regrets being in contact with Epstein after his guilty verdict”.

Democratic Party lawmakers released emails from the Epstein estate this week that indicate Epstein was of the opinion Trump was aware of conduct by the now-convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell. In response, GOP lawmakers published a much bigger tranche of 20,000 emails from the Epstein estate.

These records show that Summers kept up congenial contact with the adjudicated child sex trafficker well into 2019, with the last email exchange happening only months before Epstein’s detention.

Trump stated on Truth Social on Friday that he would be asking the Department of Justice and the FBI to look into Epstein’s “role and association” with Summers, among other influential Democratic figures and business leaders.

In the emails, Summers and Epstein discuss politics – especially Summers’s disdain for Trump – as well as the details of non-profit social networking – and women. Summers, 70, shared with Epstein in a 2019 exchange about his overtures toward an unnamed woman, and being rejected.

“she is clever. ensuring you atone for previous missteps,” Epstein responded in an exchange on 16 March. “ignore the daddy im going to go out with the motorcycle guy, you reacted well.. annoyed shows caring., no whining showed strentgh.”

Summers reiterated his remorse in a recent statement. “There are many things I regret in my life,” he commented. “I’ve expressed this previously: my relationship with Jeffrey Epstein was a grave mistake.”

Summers was president of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006. Epstein donated more than $9m to Harvard and its associated programs between 1998 and 2008, and was designated a visiting fellow to conduct research. The university later found Epstein “lacked the scholarly credentials visiting fellows usually possess and his application proposed a course of study Epstein was unqualified to pursue”.

Harvard only stopped accepting Epstein’s donations after he pleaded guilty to child sex offenses in 2008.

By that time Obama’s profile was growing. Summers would eventually receive appointment as director of the White House economic advisory body from January 2009 until November 2010.

After Summers left the White House, he began requesting Epstein for charitable advice for his wife, Elisa New, a Harvard professor pursuing a poetry project. Epstein and his foundations made gifts to projects connected to Summers’s wife, and the two men met a multiple times between 2013 and 2016, often for dinner.

After reporting about Epstein’s donations surfaced, New’s charity made a donation “more than” of that received to anti-exploitation organizations.