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President Donald Trump directed the Justice Department and the FBI on Friday to "investigate Jeffrey Epstein's involvement and relationship with Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Reid Hoffman, J.P. Morgan, Chase, and many other people and institutions, to determine what was going on with them, and him."
The order has clearly ruffled some feathers among some of the infamous sex offender's associates.
For instance, Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, claimed on X that the "calls for baseless investigations of me are nothing more than political persecution and slander. I was never a client of Epstein's and never had any engagement with him other than fundraising for MIT."
A spokesperson for Clinton told NBC News that the emails "prove Bill Clinton did nothing and knew nothing," adding that the "rest is noise meant to distract from election losses, backfiring shutdowns, and who knows what else."
JPMorganChase said in response to Trump's announcement, "We regret any association we had with the man, but did not help him commit his heinous acts. We ended our relationship with him years before his arrest on sex trafficking charges."
While some of Epstein's pen pals are proclaiming their supposed innocence, Summers, a Harvard professor who served as former President Barack Obama's top economic adviser and former President Bill Clinton's treasury secretary, has instead signaled regret and announced he is effectively going into hiding.
'She is doomed to be with you.'
"I am deeply ashamed of my actions and recognize the pain they have caused," Summers said in a statement on Monday. "I take full responsibility for my misguided decision to continue communicating with Mr. Epstein."
"While continuing to fulfill my teaching obligations, I will be stepping back from public commitments as one part of my broader effort to rebuild trust and repair relationships with the people closest to me," added Summers.
RELATED: Trump gives Republicans the green light on the Epstein files: 'I DON’T CARE!'
Photographer: Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The Economic Club of New York has reportedly postponed an event featuring Summers and the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank with strong ties to the Democratic Party, and indicated on Monday that Summers has ended his fellowship with them.
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D) has called on Harvard University to similarly cut ties with Summers.
Warren, another Democrat who has worked at Harvard as a professor, told CNN, "For decades, Larry Summers has demonstrated his attraction to serving the wealthy and well-connected, but his willingness to cozy up to a convicted sex offender demonstrates monumentally bad judgment."
"If he had so little ability to distance himself from Jeffrey Epstein even after all that was publicly known about Epstein’s sex offenses involving underage girls, then Summers cannot be trusted to advise our nation’s politicians, policymakers, and institutions — or teach a generation of students at Harvard or anywhere else," added Warren.
CNN indicated that Harvard had not responded to its requests for comment.
Among the over 20,000 pages of damning Epstein emails released by the House Oversight Committee last week were numerous messages between the dead sex trafficker and Summers, in many cases about women, politics, and projects linked to Harvard University, where Summers was president from 2001 to 2006.
While remorseful now that his correspondences have been published, Summers evidently had no issue gossiping with Epstein in the years following his 2008 felony conviction for solicitation of prostitution and solicitation of prostitution from a person under the age of 18. Summers apparently wrote to Epstein as late as July 5, 2019 — a day before Epstein was arrested on new federal charges of sex trafficking of minors and a month before he was found hanged in his prison cell.
The Harvard Crimson highlighted that in addition to apparently joking with Epstein about women being less intelligent than men, criticizing Harvard's admission of a black baby killer, and discussing the sex offender's donations to various initiatives, Summers also turned to Epstein for advice on romantic matters.
In a sequence of texts and emails between November 2018 and the eve of Epstein's July 2019 arrest, Summers reportedly pressed the convicted sex offender — who described himself as the Harvard professor's "wing man" — for advice about pursuing a woman he characterized as a mentee.
In one instance, Summers — who has been married to his second wife, Elisa New, since 2005 — reportedly forwarded Epstein an email from the object of his desire wherein she requested feedback for a paper.
Epstein, responding to Summers' suggestion that he should hold off on replying, wrote, "She's already begining [sic] to sound needy :) nice."
The Crimson noted that the woman Summers was attempting to seduce and referencing in a number of his messages with Epstein was Chinese economist Keyu Jin, a professor of finance at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology who earned her Ph.D. at Harvard between 2000 and 2009.
Jin's father happens to be a former high-ranking Chinese Communist Party official with whom Summers was apparently quite close. In a letter dated Dec. 22, 2018, Jin thanked Summers for his support and for his support for her father's work. Her father, Jin Liquin, served as China's vice minister of finance and ran part of Beijing's imperialistic Belt and Road Initiative.
Summers forwarded the letter to Epstein, noting that he "sent a comment in mtg w her father flattering her father and saying other China officials had flattered him as well."
In the months that followed, both men continued to discuss Summers' relationship with the woman and joked about the Harvard professor's probability of having sex with her, even as their relationship was apparently petering out.
"She is doomed to be with you," Epstein wrote Summers in 2019, though the identity of the woman Epstein was referencing is unclear.
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