During Larry Summers’s long involvement with Jeffrey Epstein, Harvard and two Democratic administrations vetted him. The pinnacle positions they vetted him for were university president and secretary of the treasury. The question is: Did everyone miss the connection and its seriousness, or did they choose to ignore it?
We know Larry Summers’s involvement with Jeffrey Epstein goes back to at least 1998, when he is reported to have flown on Epstein’s private jet from Aspen to Washington, D.C. Summers was the deputy secretary of the treasury at that time. He maintained his contact with Epstein until July 5, 2019, the day before Epstein’s arrest on new charges of sex trafficking. That is a cumulative 22 years, a considerable amount of time by any standard. (RELATED: The Bonfire of the Academies)
We also know that Summers’s contact with Epstein was not simply casual. The 1998 plane flight is just one example. Another is that Summers spent time on Epstein’s private island while on his honeymoon in 2005.
Even more telling comes from a release of tens of thousands of documents by House Republicans on the Oversight Committee. Included in House Republicans’ “data dump” were hundreds of emails Summers exchanged with Epstein between 2013-2019. Summarizing these emails, The Harvard Crimson wrote that “Summers placed an extraordinary degree of trust in Epstein, confiding to him about his pursuit of a romantic relationship with an economist.” Epstein called himself Summers’s “wing man” in the pursuit.
There is no need to go into what else is revealed in the Summers-Epstein emails. Nor is there a need to speculate on the men’s relationship: Epstein had many in his massive network that included many influential people for many purposes.
Worth considering here is not Summers but the organizations and people who vetted him during his two-decade-long connection with Epstein.
Worth considering here is not Summers but the organizations and people who vetted him during his two-decade-long connection with Epstein. During that time, Summers held many extremely important positions, the most significant being with the Clinton and Obama administrations and Harvard University.
Larry Summers joined the Clinton administration in 1993 as undersecretary for international affairs at the Department of the Treasury. In 1995, he moved up to deputy secretary of the treasury. As earlier mentioned, it was during his time in that position that we know he took his first flight on Epstein’s private jet. While it is presumable that Summers already knew Epstein before he was invited to fly on his private jet, for simplicity’s sake, we can start our count from there. The next year, in 1999, Summers became treasury secretary, remaining in that position through the end of the Clinton administration.
When the Clinton administration ended, Summers became the president of Harvard University, staying in that role from July 2001 to June 2006, before being pushed out by a faculty no-confidence vote.
Summers joined the Obama administration as director of the National Economic Council from January 2009 until November 2010, amid the Financial Crisis. Summers returned to Harvard, where he remained a tenured professor.
For roughly 15 years, there things stayed — Summers remaining at Harvard and serving in various private sector capacities — until House Republicans’ Nov. 12 release of thousands of pages of Epstein files. And things began falling apart quickly.
With the revelation of Summers’s emails to Epstein, the DOJ opened an investigation into the connection between Summers and Epstein on Nov. 14. On Nov. 17, Summers announced his withdrawal from public commitments but not his teaching obligations: “While continuing to fulfill my teaching obligations, I will be stepping back from public commitments.” At the same time, Summers sent a statement to The Harvard Crimson: “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.”
Just two days later, and one day after Harvard announced it was probing Summers’s ties to Epstein, Summers announced that he would not continue teaching while Harvard investigates and that he was resigning as director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard’s Kennedy School.
Throughout almost all of this long and complicated timeline, we know Summers was involved with Epstein. It also seems unlikely others did not as well: Flying on a private plane while a high-ranking public official invites scrutiny; taking a honeymoon on a private island attracts attention.
Granted, the contact that we know of, between Summers and Epstein, was brief during the Clinton administration. Even so, he was tapped to be secretary of the treasury after we knew of Summers’s contact with Epstein. Did the Clinton administration uncover anything in its vetting process for one of the top cabinet posts?
After the Clinton administration, things get more serious as the Summers-Epstein connection continues and, presumably, grows.
What did Harvard find out about Summers during its 2001 vetting of him to be president? That was three years after Summers had met Epstein. Did Harvard uncover anything about Summers’s relationship with Epstein during Summers’s presidency — a presidency marked by contention and scrutiny?
What did the Obama administration uncover about Summers in its 2009 vetting for a crucial economic position at a time of economic crisis?
Until his abrupt withdrawal from teaching, Summers was deeply involved with the university for 15 years — a period when Summers was also closely connected to Epstein.
During much of Summers’s prominent public career, he was involved with Epstein. From the released emails, we know that connection was deep. And during these entwined professional and personal paths, Summers was repeatedly vetted at presumably the highest levels for some of the nation’s most important and prestigious jobs. How was the Summers-Epstein relationship not known? And if it was, why was it not a disqualifying factor?
Since Summers’s contact with Harvard has been the most prolonged and overlaps with Summers’s entire period of contact with Epstein, how did Harvard miss the Epstein connection over and over again? It is one thing to claim that Summers’s personal conduct was not closely scrutinized for government service (though this also seems hard to believe, considering the prominence of the positions). However, personal conduct would seem to be quite crucial for Summers’s roles at Harvard, where he taught young people.
Remember, too, Epstein’s first conviction was in June 2008 for soliciting prostitution and for soliciting prostitution from a minor under 18. That conviction took place well before Summers joined the Obama administration. It was also 17 years before Harvard finally undertook its own investigation this year.
It is certainly possible that someone’s deepest secrets could be successfully hidden — and that Summers would go to great lengths to hide these. Yet it is equally questionable how they could be missed for so long by so many.
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J.T. Young is the author of the recent book, Unprecedented Assault: How Big Government Unleashed America’s Socialist Left, from RealClear Publishing. Follow him on Substack.
