An Obama-era attorney disclosed “non-public” information to child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein with regard to the White House’s response to the Secret Service’s sex scandal.
Kathryn Ruemmler works as Goldman Sachs’s chief legal officer, but last week, the star attorney was forced to resign over her myriad ties to the man she warmly referred to as “Uncle Jeffrey.” Her resignation goes into effect on June 30.*
But recently released emails from 2014 reveal that the counsel’s fondness for the “international man of mystery” inspired her to share a draft of an official White House press response with him, dishing then-unreleased information to the convicted sex criminal, reported Bloomberg Thursday.
At the time of her emails, the White House was embroiled in a global controversy: In 2012, more than a dozen Secret Service agents (and military men) had decided to booze their way through a presidential trip in Cartagena, Colombia, hiring prostitutes along the way. The elite law enforcement personnel did so, despite the fact that Colombian sex workers were frequently hired as spies by the country’s powerful drug cartels, sparking questions about possible national security concerns in the fallout.
Ruemmler was one of the staffers handling the White House’s official response to the fiasco. Two years after the disastrous Cartagena trip, she spoke with Epstein about the situation, forwarding him a draft email that contained sensitive information about the role that the White House played in investigating the sexual misconduct.*
In return, Epstein offered advice and edits. “Breathe, smile. You’re free,” he wrote in one message.
The exchange took place six years after Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting children as young as 14 to have sex with him. The Justice Department’s review of the Epstein files concluded that the well-connected financier had harmed more than 1,000 women and children in his global sex-trafficking ring, all of whom “suffered unique trauma.”
Jennifer Connelly, a spokeswoman for Ruemmler, told Bloomberg that the former White House counsel “has done nothing wrong and has nothing to hide. Nothing in the record suggests otherwise.”
“Ms. Ruemmler has deep sympathy for those harmed by Epstein and if she knew then what she knows now, she never would have dealt with him at all,” Connelly said.
Recent reports indicate that the DOJ has only released a fraction of the Epstein files, potentially holding onto upward of 50 terabytes that the agency has not yet disclosed. The recent releases, which include millions of pages of documents, amount to roughly 300 gigabytes, or 2 percent of the estimated total.
* This article previously misstated when Ruemmler’s work at Goldman Sachs ends, as well as the nature of her outreach to Epstein.