Former Obama White House counsel to face House questioning over Epstein ties

Kathryn Ruemmler, who served as White House counsel under Barack Obama, is set to testify on Wednesday before the House committee on oversight and reform about her ties to Jeffrey Epstein as part of the panel’s investigation into the convicted sex offender.Ruemmler came under scrutiny earlier this year after her name appeared thousands of times in the records related to Epstein that were released by the Justice Department under the Epstein Files Transparency Act. She announced in February that she would be resigning from her role at Goldman Sachs as chief legal officer effective on 30 June.Emails between Ruemmler and Epstein, exchanged between 2014 and 2019 – years after Epstein pleaded guilty to Florida state prostitution charges, including procuring a minor – showed that Ruemmler accepted luxury gifts from Epstein, addressed him as “Uncle Jeffrey” and “sweetie”, advised him on how to respond to questions about his sex crimes, and, a document showed that she was at one point listed as a backup executor of his will, according to the Wall Street Journal.In one 2015 email, Ruemmler wrote to Epstein: “friendships goes two ways – getti=g you some peace with respect to all of this legal shit is important to me.”In an interview for a guest essay in the New York Times opinion section in June, Ruemmler said that she first got connected with Epstein in 2014, after she left the White House, and Epstein contacted her about a potential opportunity to work with Bill Gates.“What I did not appreciate at the time and now deeply regret,” Ruemmler said, “is that Epstein used me, along with many others, to legitimize his standing.”“If I had seen or heard anything to suggest that Epstein was harming women or girls, I would have taken action to stop it,” she added.Wednesday’s interview will be conducted behind closed doors, with the committee expected to release a transcript at a later date, as it has for previous witnesses.In a statement to the Guardian this week, ahead of her testimony, a spokesperson for Ruemmler said that Ruemmler “welcomes the opportunity to appear before the Committee”.“At the time she interacted with Jeffrey Epstein, she was a practicing criminal defense attorney and shared a client with him,” the spokesperson said. “She has done nothing wrong and had no knowledge of any ongoing criminal activity on his part.”Despite announcing her resignation from her role as chief legal officer at Goldman Sachs in February. The Financial Times, Bloomberg and others reported in June that Ruemmler agreed to continue on at Goldman Sachs in an advisory role, after CEO David Solomon asked her to remain at the bank as an adviser.Goldman’s decision was criticized by some lawmakers, including two Democratic lawmakers, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi, who sent a letter to Solomon in June requesting information about the decision, and asked the bank to respond to a series of questions, including about what Ruemmler had disclosed about her relationship with Epstein before joining the firm.The lawmakers said in their letter that the documents released by the Justice Department “suggested that Ruemmler maintained a far more extensive relationship with Epstein than she previously publicly acknowledged”.Goldman Sachs declined to comment.