Who is Larry Summers, the former Harvard president now under scrutiny for Epstein ties?

The emails, published last week, showed that many people in Epstein’s network, including Summers, continued communicating with him after his 2008 guilty plea for soliciting prostitution from an underage girl. One exchange from 2019, included in the release, showed Summers describing a brief interaction with a woman: “I said what are you up to. She said ‘I’m busy’. I said awfully coy u are.”

Epstein replied: “you reacted well.. annoyed shows caring. , no whining showed strentgh.”

Following the email release, Summers also resigned from the board of OpenAI, his office confirmed. Representatives from the Center for American Progress and Yale’s Budget Lab also told AP he was no longer associated with their organisations.

AP reported that Donald Trump asked the Justice Department and FBI to investigate the Epstein ties of Summers and other prominent Democrats. US Attorney General Pam Bondi said she had assigned a top federal prosecutor to lead that probe, months after her department had announced it lacked sufficient basis for further investigations into Epstein associates.

Key figure in Clinton-era economic policy

Summers rose to national prominence during the Clinton administration. AP reported that he had been one of Harvard’s youngest-ever tenured scholars at age 28 and later took a senior role at the World Bank.

His public profile expanded as he helped lead the US response to the Asian financial crisis as deputy treasury secretary. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine alongside Robert Rubin and Alan Greenspan: a trio famously labelled the “Committee to Save the World.”

Summers later became Clinton’s final treasury secretary during a period of widespread deregulation in Washington. He was among Democrats who supported legislation that removed or weakened long-standing financial rules dating back to the Great Depression, a stance that would later draw heavy criticism after the 2008 financial crash.

Also Read: Trump says ‘I know nothing about that’ after new Epstein email; calls for probes into Clinton, other Democrats

Controversy at Harvard and Fed

Summers returned to Harvard as president in 2001, but his tenure became marked by controversy. In 2005, during a conference on diversity in science and engineering, he suggested that women were underrepresented in those fields because of “intrinsic aptitude.” AP reported that the remarks were widely criticised as sexist.

He stepped down in 2006 following disputes with faculty and the backlash over the comments.

Summers returned to Washington in 2009 during the global financial crisis, serving as former President Barack Obama’s director of the National Economic Council. But many Democrats, especially from the party’s progressive wing, continued to view him as tied to the push for pre-crisis deregulation.

Even Bill Clinton later said that although he took responsibility for signing the deregulation laws, he believed Summers and Rubin had been wrong in advising against regulating derivatives, instruments later blamed for worsening financial instability.

Obama considered Summers to succeed Ben Bernanke as Federal Reserve chair, but strong opposition in the Senate over his comments on women and his deregulatory record made confirmation unlikely. Summers withdrew, and Obama instead nominated Janet Yellen, who became the Fed’s first female leader.