Goldman Sachs backs Kathy Ruemmler

Goldman Sachs on Thursday strongly backed its top lawyer, Kathy Ruemmler, a day after a congressional committee released her chummy emails with notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein before she joined the investment bank.

Those emails feature Ruemmler, who served as White House counsel to former President Barack Obama, and Epstein exchanging thoughts about President Donald Trump, former President Bill Clinton, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and overweight highway rest stop patrons.

“See you at 2, I ordered sushi for you,” Epstein wrote Ruemmler in March 2018 as part of an email thread that began with him sending her a Daily Beast article headlined, “How close is Donald Trump to a psychiatric breakdown?”

Those emails came about 17 months before Epstein’s arrest on federal child sex trafficking charges. He killed himself weeks after that arrest in a Manhattan jail.

Ruemmler is Goldman’s chief legal officer and general counsel.

Goldman Sachs spokesman Tony Fratto, in a statement to CNBC, said, “These emails were private correspondence well before Kathy Ruemmler joined Goldman Sachs.”

“Kathy is an exceptional general counsel and we benefit from her judgment every day,” Fratto said.

Ruemmler did not respond to requests for comment about her emails with Epstein on Thursday.

In 2023, Ruemmler told The Wall Street Journal, “I regret ever knowing Jeffrey Epstein.”

Ruemmler, who served as Obama’s White House general counsel and as a federal prosecutor, exchanged emails with Epstein while she was a partner with the law firm Latham & Watkins, where she was global chair of the white-collar defense and investigations practice.

The Journal in 2023 reported that Ruemmler “had dozens of meetings with Epstein in the years after her White House service and before she became a top lawyer at Goldman Sachs ... in 2020.”

“He also planned for her to join a 2015 trip to Paris and a 2017 visit to Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean,” the Journal reported then. The newspaper, citing a Goldman Sachs spokesman, reported that Epstein introduced her to potential legal clients, including Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft.

Goldman has previously said that Ruemmler had a professional relationship with Epstein connected to her role at Latham, but Latham also has said he was not a client of that firm.

Her missives with Epstein, which the House Oversight Committee released on Wednesday, were exchanged years after Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 in a Florida state court to prostitution charges involving an underage girl.

Epstein served 13 months in jail in that case and had to register as a sex offender.

“Trump is living proof of the adage that it is better to be lucky than smart,” Ruemmler wrote Epstein on Aug. 26, 2015, according to the email thread received by House Oversight from Epstein’s estate…