Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is looking for Harvard to chop ties with the college’s former president and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, after the extent of Summers’ friendship with Jeffrey Epstein was laid naked in a doc dump from Epstein’s property final week.
Summers’ messages appeared commonly in Epstein’s inbox, even after the billionaire financier pleaded responsible to soliciting intercourse from underage women in Florida in 2008.
In a number of emails reviewed by The Harvard Crimson, Summers and Epstein mentioned the opportunity of the billionaire making monetary contributions to the college, with a selected emphasis on a digital poetry initiative spearheaded by Summers’ spouse.
In dozens of others, Summers delves into his private life, each soliciting and providing relationship recommendation.
In one other e-mail, dated October 2017, Summers appeared to sympathize with Epstein, bemoaning an “American elite” that ostracizes somebody who “hit on a few women” a decade in the past, whereas providing a path to redemption for different 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 informed CNN in a press release.
“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 round $9.1 million to the college between 1998 and 2008, overlapping with Summers’ tenure as president of the college from 2001 to 2006.
Summers has beforehand mentioned he “regrets” his relationship with Epstein.
“I have great regrets in my life,” he wrote, in a press release relayed by The Crimson. “As I have said before, my association with Jeffrey Epstein was a major error of judgement.”
