Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers is resigning from his academic and faculty positions at Harvard University over his previous ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Summers, who was president of the university from 2001 to 2006 after his tenure in former President Bill Clinton‘s Cabinet, has been mentioned and shown in photographs released in the Department of Justice’s Epstein files. Summers began stepping back from public life in November as messages between himself and Epstein were released, but he held on to his teaching roles at the time.
“Professor Summers has announced that he will retire from his academic and faculty appointments at Harvard at the end of this academic year and will remain on leave until that time,” Harvard spokesman Jason Newton told the Washington Examiner on Wednesday.
Summers also resigned from his position as co-director of Harvard’s Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government. Newton said Dean Jeremy Weinstein of the Harvard Kennedy School for public policy accepted Summers’s resignation, “in connection with the ongoing review by the University of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein that were recently released by the government.”
Harvard opened the investigation into Summers in November after the House publicly released a series of Epstein’s email correspondence. In the trove of emails, Summers sought advice from Epstein in his pursuit of a woman he deemed his mentee, and Epstein described himself as the economist’s “wing man.”
Summers told the Harvard Crimson his decision to resign was “difficult.”
“Free of formal responsibility, as President Emeritus and a retired professor, I look forward in time to engaging in research, analysis, and commentary on a range of global economic issues,” Summers said.
Summers and Epstein’s email correspondence showed the two kept in touch up until the day before Epstein’s July 2019 arrest, according to the university’s student newspaper.
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Summers is the latest powerful acquaintance of Epstein to fall from grace after the DOJ’s rollout of the files. Richard Axel, a molecular biologist from Columbia University, stepped down on Tuesday over his ties to Epstein.
Clinton and his wife, Hillary Clinton, are set to testify before the House oversight committee on Epstein this week.