Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers said Monday he’s ditching his public gigs after a trove of embarrassing emails with Jeffrey Epstein burst into view.
“I am deeply ashamed of my actions and recognize the pain they have caused. I take full responsibility for my misguided decision to continue communicating with Mr. Epstein,” Summers said in a statement obtained by CNBC.
Summers, a former Harvard president and current professor, said he’ll keep teaching but will “be stepping back from public commitments as one part of my broader effort.”
The longtime Democratic heavyweight sits on OpenAI’s board and pens columns for Bloomberg News.
His retreat comes after Harvard’s student newspaper, the Crimson, laid out a string of messages between Summers and Epstein, documents obtained after the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee subpoenaed Epstein’s estate and released more than 20,000 records last week.
The Crimson reported that when Summers was “pursuing a romantic relationship with a woman he described as a mentee,” he turned to none other than the already-convicted sex offender for advice.
Emails and texts from late 2018 through mid-2019 showed Summers — who is married — asking Epstein how to handle the situation, a full decade after Epstein pleaded guilty in Florida to soliciting sex from an underage girl.
In those exchanges, Epstein played the role of armchair dating coach. The Crimson noted one message in which Epstein boasted that he was acting as Summers’ “wing man.”
“Think for now I’m going nowhere with her except economics mentor,” Summers wrote in November 2018. “I think I’m right now in the seen very warmly in rear view mirror category.”
“She must be very confused or maybe wants to cut me off but wants professional connection a lot and so holds to it.”
The fallout has already landed on Harvard’s doorstep. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat and former Harvard Law professor, told CNN the university should cut Summers loose.
Summers directs the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School and is teaching five courses this semester.
Warren said Summers “cannot be trusted” with students, given his entanglement with Epstein.
“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,” she told CNN.
“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.”
The scandal is also drawing fresh attention from Washington. On Friday, Attorney General Pam Bondi said she had asked Manhattan U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton — at President Donald Trump’s request — to investigate Epstein’s links to Summers, former President Bill Clinton, billionaire Reid Hoffman, and JPMorgan Chase.
Trump himself once counted Epstein as a friend. The president has faced steady criticism for the Justice Department’s refusal to release files tied to Epstein, who killed himself in August 2019 after being charged with federal child sex trafficking.
The House is expected to vote Tuesday on a measure that would force the DOJ to cough up the long-sought Epstein documents.
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