Larry Summers faces bipartisan scrutiny over years-long ties to Epstein

Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle are urging companies and institutions to cut ties with Harvard professor and economist Larry Summers after documents released by the House oversight committee revealed email exchanges between Summers and the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who called himself Summers’ “wing man”.

Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren told CNN that Summers should be held accountable for his years-long relationship with Epstein. Besides Summers, the emails released last week revealed how Epstein maintained contact with other business executives, reporters, academics and political players despite his 2008 guilty plea for soliciting prostitution from an underage girl.

“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 said to 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.”

A senior Trump administration official told Politico that institutions should end their association with Summers, given the relationship he had with Epstein, who referred to himself in one November 2018 message as Summers’ “wing man”.

“It’s shocking that Larry Summers remains a paid contributor to Bloomberg News, on the board of OpenAI and tenured at Harvard,” the anonymous source told Politico. “What more revelations about him and his “wing man” will it take for institutions to cut him loose? The British government immediately sacked their ambassador to the US over much less.”

Summers is now the subject of a new investigation that Donald Trump started last week. The US president instructed attorney general Pam Bondi to launch an inquiry into several Democrats and institutions after their names appeared in the latest tranche of documents, which included emails that seemed to suggest Trump himself might have known about Epstein’s conduct.

The exchanges, from 2013 to early 2019, showed Summers and Epstein sharing personal views about politics and relationships. Summers lost his position as president at Harvard in 2006 after making sexist comments about female academics, and the emails released last week have reignited debates about his relationship with the late sex offender.

“I’m trying to figure why [the] American elite think if u murder your baby by beating and abandonment it must be irrelevant to your admission to Harvard,” Summers wrote to Epstein in a 2017 email. “But hit on a few women 10 years ago and can’t work at a network or think tank. DO NOT REPEAT THIS INSIGHT.”

Summers added: “I observed that half of the IQ In [the] world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51% of population.”

Other emails reveal Summers approached Epstein for romantic advice. In November 2018, Summers seemed to forward an email from a woman to ask for Epstein’s advice on when to write back.

“Think no response for a while probably appropriate,” Summers wrote. Epstein replied: “she’s already beginning to sound needy :) nice.”

Summers reiterated his regret to the Harvard Crimson last week.

“I have great regrets in my life,” he wrote. “As I have said before, my association with Jeffrey Epstein was a major error of judgment.”

The college newspaper also reported that Harvard professors were outraged by the revelations made by the trove of emails released last week.

“The cozy friendship between Epstein and Summers on display in the emails is disgusting and disgraceful,” statistics professor Joseph K Blitzstein told the Crimson.

The relationship between Summers and Epstein was previously reported by the Wall Street Journal in 2023. According to the outlet, in 2014, Summers had asked Epstein for advice on getting $1m in funding for his wife’s poetry project.