On Thursday evening, Kathryn “Kathy” Ruemmler — former White House Counsel to President Barack Obama, once considered a leading candidate for Attorney General of the United States, and until last night the top lawyer at Goldman Sachs — announced she was stepping down.
The reason, stripped of corporate niceties, is simple: the Epstein emails.
Thousands of pages of correspondence between Ruemmler and Jeffrey Epstein, released by the Department of Justice under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, have revealed a relationship far more intimate, far more transactional, and far more troubling than anything Ruemmler or Goldman Sachs had previously acknowledged. And buried within that correspondence is a detail that connects Ruemmler directly to a question with implications reaching far beyond Wall Street — all the way to the defense of hip-hop pariah Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter – and his troubled associates.
On April 1, 2019, Jeffrey Epstein emailed Kathy Ruemmler and asked her a question: should he hire Alex Spiro?
The DOJ-released file, designated EFTA02635777, contains an email dated April 1, 2019, in which Epstein writes to Ruemmler: “bannon thinks I should hire burk and spiro to deal with civil? thoughts.”
Three days later, on April 4, Epstein emailed attorney Brad Karp — then the chairman of Paul Weiss, who himself resigned from that position on February 4 amid his own Epstein email fallout — writing: “Alex Spiro and Bannon coming at 4 tomorrow.” A Google Calendar entry in the DOJ files confirms the meeting was scheduled.
The implications of this exchange are significant. Epstein wasn’t simply hiring a lawyer. He was consulting his most trusted legal adviser — a former White House Counsel, a woman he’d cultivated with luxury gifts and personal attention for five years — about whether to bring a legal ‘fixer’ – one Mr. Alex Spiro into his orbit. And the recommendation to hire Spiro came from Steve Bannon, the former Trump White House chief strategist, who himself appears extensively in the newly released Epstein files.
Alex Spiro would go on to become one of the most controversial defense attorneys in America. Today, he is Jay-Z’s personal lawyer. He is the attorney who aggressively fought to dismiss the civil lawsuit accusing Jay-Z and Sean “Diddy” Combs of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl. He is also part of the legal team that represented serial predator Harvey Weinstein, alongside ‘fruit of the poisonous tree,’ Lisa Bloom.
And according to Epstein’s own emails, his path to prominence ran through Jeffrey Epstein’s network — with Kathy Ruemmler standing at the crossroads.
Ruemmler has maintained, through a spokesperson, that her relationship with Epstein was professional — rooted in her work as a white-collar defense attorney at Latham & Watkins, where she landed after leaving the Obama White House in 2014. She has said she never formally represented Epstein. She has called him a “monster.”
The emails tell a different story.
Ruemmler met Epstein in 2014, shortly after leaving the White House. Epstein initially wanted to hire her to work on a donor-advised fund he was launching with Bill Gates. He soon steered her toward representing his client, Bank Edmond de Rothschild, which Epstein told her had “a justice department problem… like every other swiss bank.” Ruemmler took the work.
From there, the relationship deepened.— well past the boundaries of a standard professional engagement. The correspondence, spanning 2014 to 2019, reveals more than 100 emails and more than 50 in-person meetings between the two, according to reporting by the Associated Press and NBC News. All of this occurred after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting sex from underage girls, when he was already a registered sex offender.
Epstein lavished Ruemmler with gifts: a $9,400 Hermès bag, a $4,200 Fendi fur-trimmed wool coat, a $1,700 Fendi leather shoulder bag, an Apple Watch, Bergdorf Goodman gift cards, spa treatments at luxury hotels in Washington and New York, and flowers when she fell ill. His assistant wrote to Ruemmler in 2016, after prepaying for one of her spa visits: “It makes him happy to see you happy.”
Ruemmler’s responses were effusive. In 2018, she thanked him: “So lovely and thoughtful! Thank you to Uncle Jeffrey!!!” In January 2019, she wrote: “Am totally tricked out by Uncle Jeffrey today! Jeffrey boots, handbag, and watch!” In another email, she gushed: “Well, I adore him. It’s like having another older brother!“
These are not the communications of a dispassionate attorney maintaining a professional distance from a convicted sex offender. These are the words of someone who had been drawn deeply into Epstein’s world — the world of gifts, access, and mutual utility that defined how the financier operated.
And it was from within this world that Epstein sought Ruemmler’s counsel on whether to hire the ‘stone cold killer,’ Alex Spiro.
The Epstein files contain multiple references to Alex Spiro. In one DOJ document, designated EFTA00782373, Spiro is described as a “Stone Cold Killer” — a term apparently referring to his aggressive legal tactics – and possibly more.
In an iMessage thread dated January 20, 2019, also contained in the files, Epstein writes: “Yes alex spiro and burck both have worked with Ben and say Harvey can’t handle that he is going away for 20 years.”
The “Ben” in the message is widely understood to refer to Benjamin Brafman, the defense attorney who represented both Harvey Weinstein and, for years, Sean “Diddy” Combs. “Burck” appears to reference William A. Burck, co-managing partner of the law firm Quinn Emanuel. “Harvey” is Harvey Weinstein.
This message places Spiro squarely within Epstein’s awareness — and within a conversation about the legal fate of Harvey Weinstein — months before Epstein formally sought to hire him in April 2019. By the time Epstein emailed Ruemmler for her thoughts on Spiro, the attorney was already on Epstein’s radar as someone with connections to Brafman’s defense team for Weinstein.
Spiro’s history with the Weinstein defense is well documented. He worked as an associate under Brafman during the Weinstein case in 2017-2018. The New York Daily News reported in 2018 that a federal lawsuit accused Spiro of using “deceptive tactics” to obtain evidence from a Weinstein accuser before the woman realized Weinstein was Brafman’s client. The matter was referred to the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, who coincidently Spiro used to work for.
Today, Spiro represents Jay-Z — the same man whose name appeared in the latest Epstein file release, contained in an FBI crisis intake report from 2019. And it is Spiro who appeared to successfully maneuvered the dismissal of the civil lawsuit against Jay-Z. However, Spiro is now embattled in a lawsuit with the plaintiff’s attorney Tony Buzbee, which he now appears to be losing.
The connections here are not allegations of criminal conduct. They are something arguably more important for the public to understand: a map of how power circulates among the elite.
Consider what the documents establish as fact:
Kathy Ruemmler — the former White House Counsel who was supposed to be the ethical gatekeeper for the Obama presidency — maintained a warm, gift-laden, five-year relationship with a convicted sex offender. She was listed as a backup executor in Epstein’s 2019 will. She advised Epstein on legal strategy, including how to manage his public reputation. In March 2019, just four months before his arrest, she coached him on how to respond to criticism that he’d received a sweetheart deal in his 2008 plea. And in April 2019, she was consulted on whether he should hire Alex Spiro.
Brad Karp — the chairman of one of the most powerful law firms in America — exchanged years of emails with Epstein. He resigned his chairmanship on February 4 after the correspondence became public.
Steve Bannon — a former senior White House adviser — recommended that Epstein hire Spiro and then attended a meeting with Spiro at Epstein’s direction on April 5, 2019. Bannon is referenced extensively in the new file releases.
Alex Spiro — the attorney recommended by Bannon, vetted by Ruemmler, and sought by Epstein — now serves as the personal attorney for Jay-Z, whose own name appeared in the same Epstein document dump. Spiro also has deep professional roots in the defense of Harvey Weinstein, another figure named in Epstein’s files.
These are not coincidences manufactured by conspiracy theorists on social media. These are documented communications, released by the United States Department of Justice, sourced from the files of a convicted sex trafficker.
The Reckoning Spreads
Ruemmler’s resignation from Goldman Sachs is part of a widening global reckoning triggered by the Epstein files. Brad Karp stepped down from Paul Weiss. Peter Mandelson, the British politician whose name appeared repeatedly in the files, was fired as the U.K. Ambassador to the United States by Prime Minister Keir Starmer in September, and resigned from the House of Lords last week. Starmer’s cabinet secretary, Chris Wormald, resigned Thursday. Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, resigned on Sunday. Norway’s ambassador to Jordan and Iraq is under review. A former president of the United Nations General Assembly resigned after texts surfaced between him and Epstein about women.
The pattern is consistent: proximity to Epstein, once tolerable in elite circles, has become professionally fatal. What has changed is not the underlying facts — many of which were known or knowable for years — but the public’s willingness to accept them.
Goldman Sachs defended Ruemmler for months. In November 2025, after Congress released some of the Ruemmler-Epstein emails, a Goldman spokesperson called her “an exceptional general counsel.” As recently as December, CEO David Solomon described her as an “excellent lawyer” and said she had his full faith. Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal reported that Goldman’s senior partners eventually began questioning why the firm was protecting her when equally qualified candidates existed for the role.
On Thursday night, the dam broke. Ruemmler told the Financial Times the media attention had become “a distraction.” She said her responsibility was to “put Goldman Sachs’ interests first.” Solomon accepted her resignation and said she would be “missed.”
The Question That Remains
Ruemmler’s departure closes one chapter but opens another. The April 2019 email — Epstein asking the former White House Counsel whether he should hire a specific lawyer, a lawyer who would go on to defend Jay-Z against sexual assault allegations arising from the same world Epstein inhabited — raises a question that no corporate resignation can answer:
What was the nature of the network that Jeffrey Epstein built among America’s legal elite? And how much of that network is still operating — not in Epstein’s name, but through the relationships, the loyalties, and the professional debts he cultivated over decades of strategic gift-giving and access-brokering?
Ruemmler has said she regrets ever knowing him. But the emails suggest she didn’t just know him. She adored “Uncle Jeffrey.” She wore his boots, carried his handbags, and answered his questions about which lawyers to hire.
The files are public now. The question is whether anyone with subpoena power will follow the thread.
