Prominent Names Found Meeting with Epstein After He Became Convicted Sex Offender
It’s never been a secret that the deceased convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein moved in the rarefied circles of wealth and power in the U.S. — even after his 2008 conviction in a child prostitution case.
But in a report on Sunday, The Wall Street Journal revealed names that appeared on Epstein’s busy meetings schedule between that conviction and his death behind bars in 2019 — and they include some major names in Democratic politics even besides Epstein’s well-known relationship with former President Bill Clinton.
The Journal reported it had reviewed “thousands of pages of emails and schedules from 2013 to 2017.”
The names, according to the Journal, include:
William Burns, the current head of the Central Intelligence Agency who was sworn in in the first months of President Joe Biden’s administration. (Five months before Biden’s catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan.)
Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College in New York’s Catskill Mountains who has made no secret of his political leanings. In a December 2016 piece he wrote that was published by Time magazine, he attributed then-President-elect Donald Trump’s successful presidential campaign to “not merely anger against elites in general but targeted resentment against the recent history of success by Americans of color.”
In other words, as Time headlined the piece: “The Election Was About Racism Against Barack Obama.”
And then there was Kathryn Ruemmler, a deputy White House counsel in the Obama administration who met with Epstein dozens of times after she left her White House job in 2014, according to the Journal.
Ruemmler is now general counsel at Goldman Sachs investment giant, according to the Journal, where she is “co-chair of its reputational risk committee, which monitors business and client decisions for potential damage to the bank’s image.”
Other names included Ariane de Rothschild — a member by marriage of the famously wealthy European banking family and chief executive of the Swiss private bank Edmond de Rothschild Group.
Another who spent time with Epstein regularly was Joshua Cooper Ramo, co-chief executive of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s consulting firm Kissinger & Associates who has held high-ranking positions in the World Economic Forum, the Aspen Institute and other bastions of the global elite.
And then, according to the Journal, there was Noam Chomsky, the fiercely liberal linguist and public intellectual who first got attention as a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War and has been a voice of the left ever since. (He apparently thinks the USSR’s failure was because it wasn’t socialist enough.)
Another major name on the left side of the political ledger was Ehud Barak, former prime minister of Israel who headed Israel’s leftist Labour Party.
All of these meetings were after Epstein’s conviction in Florida of soliciting a child for prostitution, but apparently those meeting with him felt he’d paid his debt to society.
Chomsky told the Journal, “what was known about Jeffrey Epstein was that he had been convicted of a crime and had served his sentence. According to U.S. laws and norms, that yields a clean slate.”
Botstein, for his part, told the Journal his relationship with Epstein was one of a college president trying to raise money from a wealthy prospective donor.”I was an unsuccessful fundraiser and actually the object of a little bit of sadism on his part in dangling philanthropic support,” Botstein told the newspaper. “That was my relationship with him.”
For Burns, the man who now leads President Joe Biden’s CIA and met with Epstein three times in 2014 when Burns was deputy secretary of state, the plea was utter ignorance about Epstein’s dark side:
“The director did not know anything about him, other than that he was introduced as an expert in the financial services sector and offered general advice on transition to the private sector,” a CIA spokeswoman said, according to the Journal. “They had no relationship.”
As for Ruemmler, who met with Epstein more than three dozen times, according to the Journal, a Goldman Sachs spokesman maintained that the relationship — which included lunches and dinners — was purely professional.
Ruemmler had visited Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse, but never Epstein’s island in the Caribbean.
She had also never traveled with him, the Goldman Sachs spokesman said.
“I regret ever knowing Jeffrey Epstein,” Ruemmler said, according to the spokesman.
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