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Goldman Sachs backs Kathy Ruemmler
Kathy Ruemmler, former White House Counsel, appears on “Meet the Press” in Washington, D.C., Sunday, June 29, 2014.
William B. Plowman | NBC Newswire | NBCUniversal | Getty Images
Goldman Sachs on Thursday strongly backed its top lawyer, Kathy Ruemmler, a day after a congressional committee released her chummy emails with notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein before she joined the investment bank.
Those emails feature Ruemmler, who served as White House counsel to former President Barack Obama, and Epstein exchanging thoughts about President Donald Trump, former President Bill Clinton, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and overweight highway rest stop patrons.
“See you at 2, I ordered sushi for you,” Epstein wrote Ruemmler in March 2018 as part of an email thread that began with him sending her a Daily Beast article headlined, “How close is Donald Trump to a psychiatric breakdown?”
Those emails came about 17 months before Epstein’s arrest on federal child sex trafficking charges. He killed himself weeks after that arrest in a Manhattan jail.
Ruemmler is Goldman’s chief legal officer and general counsel.
Goldman Sachs spokesman Tony Fratto, in a statement to CNBC, said, “These emails were private correspondence well before Kathy Ruemmler joined Goldman Sachs.”
“Kathy is an exceptional general counsel and we benefit from her judgment every day,” Fratto said.
Ruemmler did not respond to requests for comment about her emails with Epstein on Thursday.
In 2023, Ruemmler told The Wall Street Journal, “I regret ever knowing Jeffrey Epstein.”
Ruemmler, who served as Obama’s White House general counsel and as a federal prosecutor, exchanged emails with Epstein while she was a partner with the law firm Latham & Watkins, where she was global chair of the white-collar defense and investigations practice.
The Journal in 2023 reported that Ruemmler “had dozens of meetings with Epstein in the years after her White House service and before she became a top lawyer at Goldman Sachs … in 2020.”
“He also planned for her to join a 2015 trip to Paris and a 2017 visit to Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean,” the Journal reported then. The newspaper, citing a Goldman Sachs spokesman, reported that Epstein introduced her to potential legal clients, including Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft.
Goldman has previously said that Ruemmler had a professional relationship with Epstein connected to her role at Latham, but Latham also has said he was not a client of that firm.
Her missives with Epstein, which the House Oversight Committee released on Wednesday, were exchanged years after Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 in a Florida state court to prostitution charges involving an underage girl.
Epstein served 13 months in jail in that case and had to register as a sex offender.
“Trump is living proof of the adage that it is better to be lucky than smart,” Ruemmler wrote Epstein on Aug. 26, 2015, according to the email thread received by House Oversight from Epstein’s estate pursuant to a subpoena.
Epstein, who previously had been a long-time friend of Trump’s, replied, “ill give you details when I see you. when are you in ny?”
Ruemmler replied by saying she was going to New York two days later, and was considering driving there.
“I will stop to pee and get gas at a rest stop on the New Jersey turnpike, will observe all of the people there who are at least 100 pounds overweight, will have a mild panic attack as a result of the observation, and will then decide that I am not eating another bite of food for the rest of my life out of fear that I will end up like one of these people,” Ruemmler wrote.
Months later, in January 2016, Epstein emailed Ruemmler, saying, “I stopped talking to [Bill] Clinton when he swore, with whole hearted conviction to me, that he had done something. , he had forgotten that he also swore the exact opposite to me only weeks before.”
On July 14, 2016, Epstein writes Ruemmler: “pretty black dress. you and ruth ginsburg.”
Ruemmler replied less than 20 minutes later: “I like that dress … narciso Rodriguez. Where did you see that picture? RBG [the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg] was my date to state dinner.”
Epstein replied that the photo was on “every news channel today,” because Ginsburg had apologized for comments she made to The Times about Trump, in which she said, “I can’t imagine what the country would be — with Donald Trump as our president” and that her late husband would have said it was “time for us to move to New Zealand.”
“Yikes,” Ruemmler wrote.
The following day, Epstein wrote a single word, “today,” to Ruemmler.
She replied, “that’s a broad question,” and he shot back, “I no longer use terms like ‘broad,’ ” with a “frown” emoji following that.
A year later, when Ginsburg’s fears had been realized and Trump had been elected president, Ruemmler, on July 20, 2017, wrote, “Trump is truly stupid.”
“Duh,” Epstein replied the following day.
Ruemmler earlier that same year said in an email to Epstein that Trump was “so gross.”
Epstein replied, “Worse in real life and upclose.”
In August 2018, Ruemmler emailed Epstein a link to a New York Times op-ed that said there was a case to be made for impeaching Trump, in connection with hush money payments others made to two women to keep them quiet about their alleged sexual trysts with him before the 2016 election. Trump denies having sex with the women: porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal.
Those payments were made and facilitated by Trump’s then-personal lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, who agreed to cooperate with federal prosecutors in their investigation of Trump.
“You see, i know how dirty donald is,” Epstein wrote in that thread. “my guess is that non-lawyers ny biz people have no idea. what it means to have your fixer flip.”
In a thread earlier that year, Epstein appeared to have forwarded a message from former Trump White House advisor Steve Bannon, who wrote, “do you think Bill Clinton would like to join you me chud and steve? could be very funny, all off the record.”
Ruemmler replied, “While he might like to, his lawyer would advise him against it. :-).”
In the same thread, Ruemmler wrote, “Barf,” after Epstein said that an unnamed woman was saying that a man named Ben was “giving her a very hard time” by asking her “to do wife like things.”
In June 2018, Epstein, in an email to Ruemmler, mentioned Facebook and its founder, Zuckerberg.
“I thought you might like to look at the recent internet and privacy opinions and pose some open questions to be discussed,” Epstein wrote. “mark wants to bring the internet to the rest of the world … and healthcare … his wife is nice but boring .. what do you see as the challenges .. what does she or he see. social.”
— CNBC’s Ashlee Trujillo, Caleigh Keating and MC Wellons contributed to this story
