(WASHINGTON) — Kathy Ruemmler, who once served as White House counsel for President Barack Obama and later worked as the top lawyer for investment bank Goldman Sachs, on Wednesday told House investigators that convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was a “masterful liar,” according to a copy of her prepared remarks reviewed by ABC News.
Ruemmler is appearing Wednesday in a closed-door session with the House Oversight Committee in its ongoing probe of the government’s handling of the investigations into Epstein.
Ruemmler never represented Epstein as an attorney, though documents in the Epstein files suggested she frequently provided legal and public relations advice to him. When Epstein was arrested on July 6, 2019, one of the first phone calls he made was to Ruemmler.
“If I knew then what I know now about who Epstein really was, I never would have accepted an initial meeting with him. It was a mistake to deal with him, and I regret it,” Ruemmler told the committee, according to her prepared remarks.
Ruemmler said she never saw any “evidence of ongoing criminal conduct or misconduct of any kind by Epstein” and would have reported him had she seen evidence of abuse. When he was indicted in 2019, Ruemmler said she was “shocked” by the allegations and cut ties with Epstein.
“I was shocked by the indictment, which alleged that Epstein had intentionally enticed and recruited minor girls to engage in sex acts with him in exchange for cash. Those horrific allegations — which covered conduct that had occurred almost 10 years before I met Epstein — contradicted what I had understood about the nature and scope of that prior conduct,” she said.
While she said she was aware of Epstein’s 2008 guilty plea to prostitution-related charges, Ruemmler said she trusted the plea deal was “a proportionate and final resolution of his criminal conduct. She added that the high-profile individuals who she thought were associated with Epstein suggested he was no longer engaging in criminal conduct, adding that he appeared to have “remorse, embarrassment, and regret for his conduct.”
“Epstein was a masterful liar, and he clearly lied to me. I can see now that he used me and other respectable people to legitimize his standing, and I know now that he often exaggerated his relationship with me to others,” she said, according to her prepared remarks. “I understand how frustrating and hurtful it must have been for anyone victimized by Epstein to see him going about his life without facing the type of accountability and consequences that he deserved. I am angry that he hurt so many people, and I regret ever having anything to do with him.”
Ranking Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia, speaking to reporters during a break in the proceedings, expressed doubt about the truthfulness of some of Ruemmler’s answers to the panel’s questions.
“I think it is difficult to see how she’s being completely truthful in there with the answers that she’s giving the committee,” Garcia said, adding that he felt she was “unwilling to take any responsibility for her relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.”
“Let’s remember that she continued to have a relationship. She was one of the last people he spoke to before he passed, and during that period of his life, she knew about the conviction, and yet she continued to have — to interact, to be friendly, to make jokes about massages that entire time,” Garcia said. “For her to continue to engage in these kind of playful activities with Jeffrey Epstein, and then for her to deny when we can all read the emails in the files about her making jokes about massaging … it just, I don’t buy that, and I don’t think we buy that.”
Ruemmler faced renewed scrutiny over the relationship after the Department of Justice’s release of Epstein files earlier this year showed a trove of emails from 2014 to 2019 between her and Epstein.
In the emails to Epstein — who she occasionally referred to as “Uncle Jeffrey” and compared to an “older brother” — Ruemmler thanked him for lavish gifts, got advice about her career, and lambasted lawyers representing Epstein’s victims.
“Victim’s rights, my ass,” Ruemmler wrote in a February 2015 email about a case related to the Crime Victims’ Rights Act.
Amid the renewed scrutiny, Ruemmler announced plans earlier this year to step down as Goldman Sachs’ chief legal officer and general counsel, and a spokesperson for the bank at the time said she “regrets ever knowing” Epstein.
In March, the House Oversight Committee sent letters to a group of individuals associated with Epstein — including Ruemmler, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, billionaire Leon Black, and others — to request they participate in transcribed interviews as part of their Epstein probe.
“Ms. Ruemmler welcomes the opportunity to appear before the Committee,” Jennifer Connelly, a spokeswoman for Ruemmler, said in a statement following the request. “At the time she interacted with Jeffrey Epstein, she was a practicing criminal defense attorney and shared a client with him. She has done nothing wrong and had no knowledge of any ongoing criminal activity on his part.”
Despite her initial plan to depart from Goldman Sachs by June, Ruemmler continues to advise the bank on its search for a new general counsel. During an interview Monday on CNBC, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon said he is “really pleased” and “very grateful that she continues to help the firm.”
“Kathy stepped away because of the noise,” he said. “Kathy has agreed to act as an adviser and help us navigate through until a new general counsel is seated. We’re running a search. We’re deep into that search. We will seat a chief legal officer at some point, you know, in the near term. And once that person is seated, Kathy will move on and do other things.”
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