(LifeSiteNews) — Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard University, has become a pariah within both the Democratic Party and the academic world after correspondence showing that he maintained a close relationship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was made public.
Emails showed that Summers had sought advice about how to romantically pursue a woman 30 years his junior from his sexual predator friend who spent a lifetime preying on teenage girls.
“I am deeply ashamed of my actions and recognize the pain they have caused. I take full responsibility for my misguided decision to continue communicating with Mr. Epstein,” said Summers on Monday.
Summers’ cozy relationship with Epstein, who pleaded guilty in 2008 to charges related to soliciting a minor for prostitution, stretched over a long period of time up until the day before Epstein’s arrest in 2019.
“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,” Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren, a former Harvard Law School professor, said in a statement on Monday.
READ: House fails to censure Democrat over friendly text messages with Jeffrey Epstein
“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,” said Warren.
Larry Summers “is the definition of the Democrat establishment,” declared Breitbart editor-in-chief Alex Marlow in a discussion with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham. Summers had once served as Treasury Secretary under former United States President Bill Clinton, and as head of President Barack Obama’s National Economic Council.
In addition to pulling back from his teaching responsibilities at the famed Ivy League school and his advisory role in the Yale Budget Lab, the 70-year-old Summers has withdrawn from his positions at leftist institutions, including the Center for American Progress, the Brookings Institute’s Hamilton Project, and the Center for Global Development where he served as board chair.
A spokesman for The New York Times, where Summers is a contributing writer, said that his contract would not be renewed.
Summers has also resigned from the board of the artificial intelligence company OpenAI, the firm behind ChatGPT.
“Summers’s fall is a reminder of the Epstein saga’s potency six years after the man was found hanged to death in a New York jail cell while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges,” noted a trio of Wall Street Journal reporters on Thursday.
