Elite impunity as its own reward

The Harvard Crimson has a good report on Larry Summers’s lenghty, post-plea bargain association with Jeffrey Epstein, which uncovered this bit of attempted self-dealing:

Former Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers maintained a close personal relationship with convicted sex criminal Jeffrey E. Epstein until just months before his death in August 2019, according to emails released by Congress on Wednesday.

The cache, released by Republicans on the House Oversight Committee, details how Summers and Epstein regularly corresponded about women, politics, and Harvard-linked projects. They appear to have maintained a close correspondence as late as March 2019 — just months before Epstein’s arrest and death.

The messages span at least seven years and blend professional dealings with candid, sometimes confessional exchanges — offering the clearest picture yet of how Epstein’s influence lingered inside Harvard’s inner orbit long after the University claimed to cut ties.

The Crimson reviewed hundreds of messages between the two men, drawn from more than 20,000 documents released by the Oversight Committee. Summers does not appear to reference Epstein’s sex crimes in any of the messages reviewed by The Crimson.

The correspondence reveals that Epstein had planned to donate $500,000 to Poetry in America — a television show and digital initiative spearheaded by Harvard English professor emerita Elisa F. New, who is married to Summers. In 2016, Epstein donated $110,000 to Verse Video Education, the non-profit organization which funds the initiative.

Ca-ching!

And needless to say, some already overexposed and overcompensated cronies would also get in on the racket:

The proposal outlined a $500,000 contribution to support production costs and expand the project’s reach. The planned funding would underwrite interviews with prominent figures — including Bill Clinton, Richard Dawkins, and Ray Dalio — and was intended, New wrote, to “give me discretion over its disbursement to Harvard and WGBH.”

New wrote that Summers had told her that Epstein and “a friend would like to contribute.”

As many people have pointed out already, the emails also reveal that Epstein was a barely literate person with absolutely nothing interesting to say about anything. He maintained relationships with powerful friends by being able to offer things — money, sure, but not just that:

he’s a provider of access to money, connections and beautiful women and girls — everything that these people need to affirm their own status. being rich and powerful is a grift which requires other to bolster & buy in. That’s the service Epstein provided.

[image or embed]— meghna jayanth (@meghna.bsky.social) Nov 13, 2025 at 1:10 AM

None of the individuals or institutions involved here, god knows, actually needed the money to do anything they couldn’t do already.

Perhaps even more so than the appallingly light sentence, the most remarkable and telling thing about the deal Trump’s future Secretary of Labor cut with Epstein is that it immunized any friends and associates who were involved in his crimes. I’m not sure you could come up with anything else that better defines where American politics has ended up in 2025.