A top lawyer at Goldman Sachs and a former White House counsel to Barack Obama announced her resignation Thursday, after emails between her and the late billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein were published by the Department of Justice.
The emails revealed a close relationship between Kathy Ruemmler and Epstein and, in one instance, found her referring to him as an “older brother” and appearing to downplay his sex crimes in others.
Ruemmler confirmed that she would “step down as Chief Legal Officer and General Counsel of Goldman Sachs as of June 30, 2026,“ having previously attempted to distance herself from the correspondence and defiantly refused to resign from a senior legal post she has held since 2020.
While she has more recently called Epstein a “monster,” her relationship with him was markedly different before his arrest for sex crimes and subsequent death by suicide in a New York City jail cell in 2019.
The emails reveal that she once referred to him as “Uncle Jeffrey” and declared that she adored him.
In a statement prior to her resignation, a Goldman spokesperson said Ruemmler “regrets ever knowing” Epstein.
During her time in private practice after leaving the White House in 2014, Ruemmler received several expensive gifts from Epstein, including luxury handbags and a fur coat, the files reveal.
The gifts were given after Epstein had already been convicted of sex crimes in 2008 and was registered as a sex offender.
“So lovely and thoughtful! Thank you to Uncle Jeffrey!!!” she wrote to him in 2018.
Historically, Wall Street frowns on gift-giving between clients and bankers or lawyers, particularly high-end gifts that could pose a conflict of interest.
Goldman Sachs requires its employees to get pre-approval before receiving or giving gifts from clients, according to the company’s code of conduct, partly in order to not run afoul of anti-bribery laws.
As late as December, Goldman CEO David Solomon described Ruemmler as an “excellent lawyer” and said she had his full faith and backing.
The near-unanimous passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act last fall set in motion a 30-day deadline for the complete release of the DOJ’s files on Epstein.
But the department published only a small portion of the files on December 19, followed by a second, slightly larger tranche on December 23, and then, five weeks later, a much bigger release, consisting of three million pages of documents, including 2,000 videos and 180,000 images.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said at a White House press briefing in support of the January 30 release that the approximately 3.5 million files published were all the DOJ could safely make available from the more than six million in its possession without compromising the victims of Epstein’s crimes.
However, many have been left dissatisfied with the handling of the files, and a group of Epstein survivors ran a TV spot during Super Bowl LX, calling for the publication of the remaining documents and telling Attorney General Pam Bondi: “It’s time to tell the truth.”
Bondi subsequently declined to apologize to, or even acknowledge, the survivors during her fiery appearance before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday.
Ruemmler is far from the only person to have faced the consequences of being named in the Epstein files, with revelations about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and former U.K. ambassador to the U.S. Peter Mandelson in particular attracting widespread outrage.
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