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The Justice Department asked a federal prosecutor on Friday to investigate ties between child sex trafficker Jeffrey E. Epstein and a list of prominent figures including Harvard professor Lawrence H. Summers, two days after the release of thousands of pages of Epstein’s correspondence.
The move came hours after United States President Donald Trump publicly urged Attorney General Pamela J. Bondi and other federal officials to probe Epstein’s relationships with Summers, former U.S. President Bill Clinton, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and several major financial institutions.
Bondi wrote that the department would “pursue this with urgency and integrity to deliver answers to the American people” in a Friday afternoon post on X. A spokesperson for the department declined to provide details on Friday evening.
Summers, a former Harvard president who served as Clinton’s Treasury secretary, has been a frequent critic of Trump’s economic policies. The other two men named in Trump’s Friday morning Truth Social post, Clinton and Hoffman, are also Democrats.
In the post, Trump accused Democrats of deflecting from the recent government shutdown by releasing a limited set of Epstein-related documents and demanded a full inquiry into what he called Epstein’s “involvement and relationship” with a slate of prominent figures.
“Records show that these men, and many others, spent large portions of their life with Epstein, and on his ‘Island.’ Stay tuned!!!” Trump wrote.
Republicans on the House Oversight Committee first released the documents on Wednesday, leaving the public to sift through a trove of more than 20,000 records that they said raised new questions about Epstein’s ties to political, academic, and financial leaders.
The emails showed that Summers and Epstein corresponded regularly through July 5, 2019, one day before Epstein was arrested in the New York area. Their exchanges mixed discussions of Harvard-linked initiatives with unusually candid personal notes about women and politics, offering a striking illustration of how Epstein lingered in some faculty members’ lives long after Harvard said it had cut ties.
Summers’ messages to Epstein included scathing comments about Trump’s first administration.
“Spend zero effort on anything about me w trump. Seeing his approach to conflict of interest, his Putin proximity, and his mindless response on Castro death I’m best off a million miles away,” Summers wrote in one email. “Until they are deeply humbled by the fuckups that are sure to come, I serve myself and country best by doing nothing that involves loyalty to them.”
The exchanges, which date from 2013 to 2019, also show Epstein planning a donation to a project run by Harvard English professor emerita Elisa F. New, who is married to Summers, and bantering about politics. In one exchange starting in 2018, Summers appeared to confide in Epstein about his personal life, sharing his romantic interest in an unnamed woman.
In email threads and text exchanges on the topic, which extended across seven months from late 2018 into 2019, Epstein described himself as a “wing man” for Summers’ romantic pursuit.
Summers, in turn, appeared to turn to Epstein for advice — and to confess conflicted feelings over his own attraction to the woman.
“Game day at conference she was extremely good,” he wrote to Epstein, apparently following the woman’s presentation at a December 2018 conference. “Smart Assertive and clear gorgeous. I’m fucked.”
Summers — who wrote that his relationship with Epstein was a “major error of judgement” in a Wednesday statement to The Crimson — has otherwise stayed quiet on the trove of documents released. On Thursday, he co-taught hundreds of students in his two undergraduate economics courses.
—Staff writer Dhruv T. Patel can be reached at dhruv.patel@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @dhruvtkpatel.
—Staff writer Cam N. Srivastava can be reached at cam.srivastava@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @camsrivastava.
