Former White House Counsel Kathy Ruemmler appears at “Meet the Press” in Washington, DC on Sunday, June 29, 2014.
William B. Plowman | NBC Newswire | NBCUniversal | Getty Images
Goldman Sachs strongly supported his top lawyer Kathy Ruemmler on Thursday, a day after a congressional committee released her buddy emails with notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein before she moved to the investment bank.
In these emails, Ruemmler, who served as a White House adviser to former President Barack Obama, and Epstein share their thoughts on President Donald Trump, former President Bill Clinton, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and overweight visitors to highway rest stops.
“See you at 2, I ordered sushi for you,” Epstein wrote to 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?” sent.
Those emails came about 17 months before Epstein’s arrest on federal child trafficking charges. Weeks after his arrest, he committed suicide in a Manhattan jail.
Ruemmler is Goldman’s chief legal officer and general counsel.
Goldman Sachs spokesman Tony Fratto said in a statement to CNBC: “These emails were private correspondence long before Kathy Ruemmler joined Goldman Sachs.”
“Kathy is an exceptional general counsel and we benefit from her judgment every day,” said Fratto.
Rümmler did not respond to requests for comment on her emails with Epstein on Thursday.
In 2023, Ruemmler told the Wall Street Journal, “I regret ever knowing Jeffrey Epstein.”
Ruemmler, who served as general counsel in the Obama White House and as a federal prosecutor, exchanged emails with Epstein while she was a partner at the law firm Latham & Watkins, where she was global chair of the economic defense and investigations department.
The Journal reported in 2023 that Ruemmler had dozens of meetings with Epstein “in the years following her White House service and before she became a top lawyer at Goldman Sachs… in 2020.”
“He also planned for her to attend a trip to Paris in 2015 and a visit to Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean in 2017,” the Journal reported at the time. The newspaper, citing a Goldman Sachs spokesman, reported that Epstein introduced her to potential legal clients, including Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft.
Goldman had previously said that Ruemmler had a professional relationship with Epstein in connection with her role at Latham, but Latham also said he was not a client of that firm.
Her letters to Epstein, released by the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday, were exchanged years after Epstein pleaded guilty in a Florida court in 2008 to charges of prostitution against an underage girl.
In this case, Epstein served 13 months in prison and had to register as a sex offender.
“Trump is living proof of the adage that it is better to be lucky than to be smart,” Ruemmler wrote to Epstein on August 26, 2015, according to the email thread obtained by House Oversight following a subpoena from Epstein’s estate.
Epstein, who had previously been a longtime friend of Trump, responded: “I’ll give you details when I see you. When are you in New York?”
Rümmler replied that she was flying to New York two days later and was thinking about going there.
“I will stop at a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike to pee and get gas, will observe all the people there who are at least 100 pounds overweight, will have a mild panic attack from the observation, and then decide that I will not eat another bite for the rest of my life for fear that I will end up like one of those people,” Ruemmler wrote.
Months later, in January 2016, Epstein emailed Ruemmler and said, “I stopped talking to him [Bill] Clinton when he swore to me with full conviction that he had done something. , he had forgotten that he had sworn to me just the opposite just weeks before.
On July 14, 2016, Epstein wrote to Ruemmler: “Pretty black dress. You and Ruth Ginsburg.”
Ruemmler responded less than 20 minutes later: “I like this dress… Narciso Rodriguez. Where did you see this picture? RBG.” [the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg] was my date to the state dinner.”
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Epstein responded that the photo was on “every news channel” today because Ginsburg had apologized for her anti-Trump comments to the Times in which she said, “I can’t imagine what the country would be like with Donald Trump as our president” and that her late husband had said it was “time for us to move to New Zealand.”
“Yikes,” Ruemmler wrote.
The next day, Epstein wrote a single word, “today,” to Rümmler.
She replied, “That’s a broad question,” and he replied, “I don’t use terms like ‘broad’ anymore,” followed by a “frown” emoji.
A year later, when Ginsburg’s fears came true and Trump was elected president, Rümmler wrote on July 20, 2017: “Trump is really stupid.”
“Duh,” Epstein replied the next day.
Ruemmler said in an email to Epstein earlier that year that Trump was “so disgusting.”
Epstein replied: “Worse in real life and up close.”
In August 2018, Ruemmler emailed Epstein a link to a New York Times op-ed that said there was a lawsuit against Trump related to hush-money payments others made to two women to keep them quiet about their alleged sexual affairs with him before the 2016 election. Trump denies having sex with the women: porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal.
These payments were made and facilitated by Trump’s then-personal attorney and fixer, Michael Cohen, who agreed to cooperate with federal prosecutors in their investigation of Trump.
“Look, I know how dirty Donald is,” Epstein wrote in that thread. “I suspect that non-lawyers and business people have no idea what it means when the fixer goes crazy.”
In a thread earlier this year, Epstein appeared to have forwarded a message from former Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon, who wrote: “Do you think Bill Clinton would like to join you, Chud and Steve? Could be very fun, off the record.”
Rümmler replied: “He might like that, but his lawyer would advise him against it. :-).”
In the same thread, Ruemmler wrote, “Barf” after Epstein said that an unnamed woman said a man named Ben was “making her life very difficult” by asking her to “do something like a woman.”
In June 2018, Epstein mentioned Facebook and its founder Zuckerberg in an email to Rümmler.
“I thought you might like to look at current opinions on the Internet and privacy and ask some open-ended questions for discussion,” 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 think are the challenges…what does she or he see? socially.”
— CNBC’s Ashlee Trujillo, Caleigh Keating and MC Wellons contributed to this story
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