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   From: consequences@democratstupidity.com   
      
   Lawrence Summers   
   8th Director of the National Economic Council   
   In office   
   January 20, 2009 – January 20, 2011   
   President	Barack Obama   
   Political party	Democratic   
   Ancestry    	Jewish   
      
   Lawrence H. Summers, a Harvard University economist and the university’s   
   former president, will step back from his teaching duties while the   
   university investigates his ties to the disgraced financier and sex   
   offender Jeffrey Epstein, a spokesman for Mr. Summers said Wednesday.   
      
   The spokesman, Steven Goldberg, said in a statement that Mr. Summers would   
   also leave his role as director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for   
   Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School. A Harvard spokesman   
   confirmed that Mr. Summers had told the university of his decision, which   
   was first reported by the Harvard Crimson.   
      
   His spokesman said that his co-teachers will finish instructing his   
   classes this semester, and he was not scheduled to teach next semester.   
   But Mr. Summers will keep his tenured status at Harvard while he pauses   
   teaching during the investigation, and he is only on leave at the   
   Mossavar-Rahmani Center.   
      
   Mr. Summers has expressed regret for maintaining his connection to Mr.   
   Epstein after the financier had gone to jail. Just hours earlier, Mr.   
   Summers also resigned from the board of OpenAI, which he joined in 2023   
   after a failed boardroom coup briefly ousted the company’s chief   
   executive, Sam Altman.   
      
   Mr. Summers’s connection with Mr. Epstein had been known for years. But a   
   tranche of emails that a House committee released last week revealed a   
   cozy relationship between the two men, who exchanged messages after Mr.   
   Epstein served jail time for sex crimes with minors. Among other topics,   
   the men discussed a woman in whom Mr. Summers, who is married, was   
   romantically interested. Mr. Epstein described himself as Mr. Summers’s   
   wingman.   
      
   At OpenAI, Mr. Summers was seen as instrumental to repairing the fractured   
   board, working with additional independent directors including Bret   
   Taylor, a former Salesforce executive, and Paul M. Nakasone, a retired   
   U.S. Army general. He sat on different board committees, including one   
   responsible for auditing the company’s finances.   
      
   Over the past two years, OpenAI has since stabilized and gone on to   
   attract tens of billions of dollars in private capital investment while   
   developing closer ties with the federal government. President Trump has   
   said that A.I. development is key to the country’s economic future.   
      
   Mr. Summers was also a part of helping the company, which started as a   
   nonprofit, adopt a new for-profit structure last month. The long-sought   
   change allows OpenAI to operate like a more traditional business, while it   
   continues to raise the enormous sums of money it needs to develop   
   artificial intelligence. The company is currently valued at more than $500   
   billion. (The Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright   
   infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies   
   have denied the suit’s claims.)   
      
   “We appreciate his many contributions and the perspective he brought to   
   the board,” OpenAI’s board of directors said in a statement to The Times   
   on Wednesday.   
      
   Mr. Summers has shed a number of other positions this week, after saying   
   on Monday that he was stepping back from public commitments to focus on   
   rebuilding trust and repairing relations. He has severed relationships   
   with the Center for American Progress and the Center for Global   
   Development, two think tanks. The New York Times Opinion section said in a   
   statement that it would not renew Mr. Summers’s contract as a contributing   
   writer.   
      
   On Monday, Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, urged   
   Harvard to cut ties with Mr. Summers.   
      
   Videos posted online Tuesday showed Mr. Summers briefly addressing his   
   communications with Mr. Epstein to a lecture hall of students.   
      
   “Some of you will have seen my statement of regret, expressing my shame   
   with respect to what I did in communication with Mr. Epstein,” Mr. Summers   
   told the class. “And that I’ve said that I’m going to step back from   
   public activities, but — for a time — but that I think it’s very important   
   that I fulfill my teaching obligations.”   
      
   He changed his mind a day later.   
      
   Mr. Epstein, who died by suicide in jail in 2019, had a long relationship   
   with Harvard, donating more than $9 million before he pleaded guilty to   
   sex crimes in 2008, according to a 2020 Harvard report.   
      
   https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/19/us/larry-summers-harvard-epstein.html   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)