Newly released emails from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate, delivered to Congress on Wednesday, reveal that the convicted sex offender ended his relationship with former President Bill Clinton because Epstein believed Clinton repeatedly lied to him.
Epstein wrote in one message that he finally cut contact after Clinton “swore, with whole-hearted conviction to me that he had done something,” only to realize Clinton had sworn the exact opposite to him weeks earlier.
A spokesperson for Bill Clinton responded to the disclosure by stating that President Clinton had no knowledge of Epstein’s criminal activities and had not spoken with him in two decades. The spokesperson emphasized that the record now shows the truth in writing.
The same batch of correspondence exposes an unusually warm and ongoing relationship between Epstein and Kathryn Ruemmler, who served as White House counsel to President Barack Obama from 2011 to 2014.
In the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election, Epstein and Ruemmler exchanged numerous friendly messages and frequently discussed political developments. Their exchanges demonstrate the extent of Epstein’s access to senior figures within Democratic circles.
One particularly striking portion of the email thread shows Epstein telling Ruemmler, “You need to talk to boss.” At that moment in time, Ruemmler’s former boss—and the person still widely understood as her ultimate superior in political matters—was Barack Obama.
Earlier in the same conversation, Ruemmler described an unnamed individual as someone who “has no conscience” and warned that the person stood “very close to being a psychopath.” She added that the situation felt “scary.”
Ruemmler also pressed the mysterious person for information, writing, “He obviously said something to you yesterday that was disturbing, and you don’t want to tell me. Tell me—I can take it. I promise.” Court records and prior reporting from The Wall Street Journal confirm that Ruemmler was once named as a backup executor in Epstein’s estate in early 2019.
The more than twenty thousand pages of documents released by the House Oversight Committee contain additional references to Bill Clinton, indicating that the complete break Epstein described may not have been permanent.
For example, in April 2018, theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss emailed Epstein with the subject line “Let’s do a men of the world conference” and attached a proposed guest list that included Clinton alongside actor Kevin Spacey, former Senator Al Franken, and director Woody Allen.
Ruemmler first met Epstein while she worked as a partner at the law firm Latham & Watkins. Today she serves as global general counsel and chief legal officer at Goldman Sachs. A spokesperson for Goldman Sachs stated that Ruemmler’s contact with Epstein remained strictly professional and arose from shared representation of a client originally referred by Epstein.
Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein’s relationship dates back to the early 1990s. Epstein made financial contributions to Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign and later donated twenty thousand dollars to Hillary Clinton’s 1999 Senate campaign. White House visitor logs from the Clinton administration record more than a dozen visits by Epstein to the executive mansion.
After Clinton left office, the two men stayed in touch. Epstein continued making donations to the Clinton Foundation, and flight manifests document that Clinton flew on Epstein’s private aircraft—the plane commonly known as the “Lolita Express”—on more than two dozen occasions.
Photographs taken during a 2002 humanitarian trip to Africa show Clinton receiving a shoulder massage from Chauntae Davies, then a twenty-two-year-old massage therapist who later said she was one of Epstein’s victims.
Although Clinton aides have long insisted the former president never visited Epstein’s private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands, Clinton did visit Epstein’s New York townhouse on multiple occasions.
Inside that Upper East Side residence, Epstein displayed a large oil painting of Bill Clinton wearing a blue dress and red high heels while lounging in the Oval Office chair—a clear allusion to the infamous Monica Lewinsky scandal that dominated Clinton’s second term.
The newly public emails add another layer to the long and complicated web of connections between Jeffrey Epstein and some of the most powerful political figures of the past three decades, raising fresh questions about what certain individuals knew, when they knew it, and why those relationships persisted for so many years.