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Former US Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers is facing fresh scrutiny after documents showed he asked Jeffrey Epstein for advice on pursuing an extramarital relationship with a woman he described as a mentee.
Summers, who ran Bill Clinton’s Treasury department and was later president of Harvard University, sent repeated messages to Epstein about a woman codenamed “peril” in 2018 and 2019, according to files released from the late sex offender’s estate last week. The Harvard Crimson first reported on the messages.
Senator Elizabeth Warren, a former Harvard law professor, urged the university to cut ties with Summers, who still teaches at the Ivy League school.
Summers’ relationship with Epstein showed “monumentally bad judgment”, Warren said in a statement, adding that he “cannot be trusted to advise our nation’s politicians, policymakers and institutions — or teach a generation of students at Harvard or anywhere else”.
The Economic Club of New York had been due to host a discussion with Summers this week but said it was postponing it on Monday morning just hours after the Crimson published its article.
The ECNY told the Financial Times the session was “postponed due to an unavoidable change in schedule”.
The latest revelations about Summers come amid a deepening scandal in Washington over Epstein’s contacts with senior figures of the US establishment, including President Donald Trump.
A cache of files released last week by members of the US House oversight committee included a document in which Epstein said Trump “spent hours at my house” with a woman later identified as a victim of sex trafficking.
The files also offered insight into Epstein’s relationship with billionaire Leon Black, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly Prince Andrew, and others.
Trump last week urged the Department of Justice to investigate Epstein’s ties to Democrats such as Clinton and Summers.
“We have nothing to do with Epstein. The Democrats do,” Trump told reporters on Monday.
More documents could be published in the coming weeks if Congress votes to compel the justice department to release its Epstein files.
Summers had already faced criticism for his links with Epstein. He previously said he regretted his relationship with the paedophile, who died in jail in 2019. But the new revelations cast light on the personal nature of their contact. Summers has been married since 2005.
Summers’ spokesperson declined to comment.
The cache of files, released last week by members of the House oversight committee, include a series of messages between Summers and Epstein about a woman Summers was interested in.
They included Summers lamenting to Epstein that he was “going nowhere with her except economics mentor” and that she had not wanted to have a drink with him “cuz she was ‘tired’”.
“When I’m reflective I think I’m dodging a bullet . . . Think right thing is to cut off contact. Suspect she will miss it. Problem is I will too,” Summers wrote in a message to Epstein in November 2018.
The following day Summers wrote that the woman had been “Smart Assertive and clear Gorgeous” at a conference and concluded: “I’m fucked”.
Epstein was arrested in July 2019 and charged with sex trafficking of minors. He had previously served 13 months in a Florida county jail as part of a 2008 plea deal that let him avoid federal charges by pleading guilty to state offences, including procuring a child for prostitution.
The Financial Times reported last week that Summers in 2017 asked Epstein, “How is life among the lucrative and louche?” He also told Epstein he had said at a conference “that half the IQ In the world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 per cent of population”.
Additional reporting by Lauren Fedor in Washington