Director of CIA Says He Had No Clue That Meeting With Jeffrey Epstein Was a Bad Idea

Despite having died in 2019 in a not-at-all-suspicious jailhouse “suicide,” the finance-world hustler and convicted sex criminal has remained the gift that keeps on giving for the various powerful U.S. figures who knew him, of whom there were apparently about one million. Every few months, it seems, someone new is trying to explain through a crisis public relations firm why they spent so much time on the man’s plane, at his Manhattan townhouse, or at his private Caribbean island, despite his reputation—established in the public record by a 2008 criminal conviction and countless lawsuits and media reports—for coercing minors into performing sex acts. The number of people who at one point had a private dinner with infamous sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein seems like it’s larger than the number of people I have spoken to in my entire life. Epstein’s schedules listed three meetings with Burns in 2014, two in Manhattan and one at a law firm in the District of Columbia; a CIA spokeswoman says Burns remembers meeting Epstein once at the law firm and once in New York. Ruemmler is now the general counsel at the investment bank Goldman Sachs and, in the Journal’s dry telling, the “co-chair of its reputational risk committee.” Jeffrey Epstein might be dead, but irony is not!