Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is calling for Harvard to cut ties with the school’s former president and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, after the extent of Summers’ friendship with Jeffrey Epstein was laid bare in a document dump from Epstein’s estate last week.
Summers’ messages appeared regularly in Epstein’s inbox, even after the billionaire financier pleaded guilty to soliciting sex from underage girls in Florida in 2008.
In several emails reviewed by The Harvard Crimson, Summers and Epstein discussed the possibility of the billionaire making financial contributions to the school, with a specific emphasis on a digital poetry initiative spearheaded by Summers’ wife.
In dozens of others, Summers delves into his personal life, both soliciting and offering relationship advice.
In another email, dated October 2017, Summers appeared to sympathize with Epstein, bemoaning an “American elite” that ostracizes someone who “hit on a few women” a decade ago, while offering a path to redemption for other seemingly worse misdeeds.
“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 in a statement.
“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,” she continued, “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.”
Epstein donated around $9.1 million to the school between 1998 and 2008, overlapping with Summers’ tenure as president of the university from 2001 to 2006.
Summers has previously said he “regrets” his relationship with Epstein.
“I have great regrets in my life,” he wrote, in a statement relayed by The Crimson. “As I have said before, my association with Jeffrey Epstein was a major error of judgement.”