The Quintessential Epstein Files Email
On June 5, 2015, Kathy Ruemmler, then a corporate lawyer for Latham & Watkins but just one year removed from her stint as White House counsel for Barack Obama, emailed her good friend Jeffrey Epstein. Ruemmler, who was once under consideration to become Obama’s attorney general, wrote, “I am working on a PR strategy for MJ White v. Elizabeth Warren.” Epstein responded, “Good[.] mj is good.” And Ruemmler followed on in a response, “Yes, and EW is the worst.”
This is the perfect Jeffrey Epstein email, with as much explanatory power about this man, and more important the world he associated with and cultivated, than anything to do with child sex abuse. It shows that there is in fact an Epstein class, which not only believes in their own personal impunity, but seeks to protect their fellow travelers as well. And that ultimately lines up with a political and economic vision that favors corporate domination over the public interest.
But you have to unravel all the backstory to best understand it.
The date—June 5, 2015—is the first important bit. Three days earlier, Sen. Warren had sent MJ (Mary Jo) White, who was then chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, one of the most withering documents I have ever seen in politics. The 13-page letter details the utter failure of White to police financial markets at the SEC, noting the inability to finalize long-delayed regulations on the sector and continued leniency in the enforcement of the securities laws.
Warren was specific on the latter point. White had continued to allow corporate offenders to settle cases without admitting guilt, despite claiming in confirmation hearings that this practice would end. In 520 settlements to that point, the SEC only sought admissions of wrongdoing in 19 cases, and in 11 of those, the companies only had to stipulate to a broad series of facts rather than the legal violations themselves.
White also allowed financial institutions that were convicted of securities law violations to continue to enjoy special regulatory privileges, by granting them waivers to ensure eligibility. That included companies found guilty of criminal misconduct, for the first time in a decade.
There is in fact an Epstein class, which not only believes in their own personal impunity, but seeks to protect their fellow travelers as well.
Finally, Warren noted that White had had to recuse herself from nearly 50 investigations because her husband, John White, was a corporate defense lawyer at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, and actively engaged in defending clients under SEC investigation. With a five-member SEC split between three Democrats and two Republicans, these constant recusals invited deadlock on key cases and in some cases blocked prosecutions.
It was a thorough and unrelenting set of charges, which clearly detailed how White’s record belied her stated aims of justice for corporate wrongdoing. If I had one quibble with Warren, it was that she should have known this before voting for White’s nomination, since White literally invented the concept of legal immunity for corporate actors.
While U.S. attorney in Manhattan in 1994, White decided to adopt something called the deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) for use in corporate criminal cases. Until then, DPAs had been previously used for juvenile delinquents to give them a chance to rehabilitate themselves. Literally, White treated corporations like children whose brains were too underdeveloped to truly hold them responsible for their actions. The initial poor unreconstructed soul was Prudential Securities, and since then, the DPA has become the standard way to pretend to crack down on corporate offenders while avoiding real accountability. Companies pay a fine, decline to admit guilt, and go about their business, with executives shielded from the inside of a jail cell or any other real sanction.
After her stint at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Mary Jo White started defending corporations directly at the BigLaw firm of Debevoise & Plimpton, until Obama made her SEC chair, enabling her to get companies off the hook directly. So in 2015, Warren lit into her. Three days later, Ruemmler, who runs in such elite circles that she literally has a line of furniture named after her, tells her pal Epstein that she’s actually writing the PR strategy for White. Epstein approves; his job, such as it is, is helping wealthy people evade taxes, so any friend of elite forgiveness is a friend of his.
About a month later, White unveiled her response to Warren, defending the SEC’s work. That one email isn’t confirmation that the SEC chair enlisted an outside corporate lawyer to do crisis communications on a political attack, but that’s certainly what Ruemmler and Epstein were bantering about.
During White’s tenure, financial firms kept breaking the law with little SEC pushback, and when White left the agency after Trump became president, she returned to Debevoise to assist corporations from the other side of the table. She would eventually become the personal lawyer of the Sackler family, whose drive for profits at Purdue Pharma led to the opioid epidemic and left hundreds of thousands dead.
White also became the criminal defense attorney for none other than Les Wexner, the fashion CEO who is likely the source of much of Epstein’s fortune, and who was recently unmasked as being listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in a 2019 FBI document about Epstein’s sex trafficking crimes. Wexner hired White shortly after Epstein died, and the mogul was later told he was not a target of any Justice Department action.
One rueful side note to this is that Ruemmler was once a kind of lonely hero in the fight for real accountability in America. In the 2000s, she was the deputy director of the Enron Task Force, a Justice Department initiative that would eventually convict the energy trader’s top executives, Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling. In 2006, Ruemmler gave the closing arguments in the Enron trial, and she was a key source in Jesse Eisinger’s book The Chickenshit Club, about why nobody with wealth and privilege goes to jail anymore.
Yet within a few years of this triumph, Ruemmler sided with the literal pioneer of elite impunity in America, against Warren—the one woman with a modicum of power who called it out. And she went on to become a backup executor of Jeffrey Epstein’s will (in 2019!), while advising him about how to evade the law and diminish the credibility of his accusers.
This is the Epstein class in all its glory. It’s an elite that schemes to remain as unaccountable for sexual crimes as it does for corporate crimes. It has its own hierarchy of friends and foes, and it will defend those friends no matter what they do, while the spoils of privilege flow. Its instinct is to protect and preserve money and power, with the concerns of anybody without a corporate jet tangential at best. And once you set those ground rules, once you build a wall around a certain class so they don’t have to pay any price for their actions, it’s inevitable that the actions will get darker and darker.
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), whose Epstein Files Transparency Act is responsible for this glimpse at what the people who run the world say to each other when they think nobody else is looking, was a guest on our Organized Money podcast, and he expressed a change in his entire view of politics because of his work on this. “Until we get some of this elite accountability,” he said, “until people see that the people who did this are being held accountable, the bankers who caused the Great Recession, the people who got us into wars, this Epstein class, until they see that, I don’t know that we will have the trust to do the bold democratic projects that I want to do.”
Maybe you see Ruemmler’s resignation last week as Goldman Sachs’s top lawyer as a measure of accountability, that she did pay for her involvement with Epstein. But it’s a very neoliberal version of accountability, the idea that the market will discipline those in the Epstein class revealed through disclosure. It will take more than transparency and a dependence on market factors to regain trust from a public that sees themselves on one side of a velvet rope, outside an inner sanctum where rules only selectively apply.
Democrats were exceedingly uncomfortable at the time with Warren going after someone from their own party. Nancy Pelosi, then House Democratic leader, went on television to specifically say that Warren did not represent the views of the party. That’s the kind of thing that turns people off to politics, a situational ethics that defends the indefensible. The Epstein files are resonating because they show how the real divides in our country fall along the lines of class.
I wrote a decade ago in my book Chain of Title that there was a rot in the heart of our democracy, and this exchange between Ruemmler and Epstein shows precisely what that rot is. George Carlin once said that it’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. We now can identify entry into that club by who had Jeffrey Epstein’s email address. It was a network of privilege and connections where your place in the world was defined by who you could get the next meeting to see, regardless of whether the man doing the connecting was a pedophile. And politicians and parties that decide to do nothing with this information, that decide to avoid the truth and try to move forward as if it didn’t happen, will learn what actual populist rage feels like.
The post The Quintessential Epstein Files Email appeared first on The American Prospect.