Unsealed Filing Raises Questions About Rumler-Epstein Ties (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: A newly unsealed court record suggests that one of the most powerful attorneys in America acted as a key advisor to Jeffrey Epstein as he faced some of his toughest reputational and legal battles before his 2019 arrest. Kathy Rumler is a former Obama White House counsel and now a top lawyer at Goldman Sachs. She says she never represented Epstein as a lawyer, but a court filing from Epstein's estate asserts that Rumler helped Epstein time and again from trying to preserve his 2008 plea deal to pushing back on media coverage and discussing settlements with victims. What's striking here is not that Rumler advised Epstein, it's that she has consistently denied advocating for him to any third party or representing him at all, even as the estate says in this court filing there was extensive legal work carried out on his behalf. The filing comes from a civil lawsuit brought by two of Epstein's victims against the executors of his estate alleging they acted as co-conspirators in Epstein's sex crimes. The executors have denied any wrongdoing. In discovery in that case, the estate produced what's known as a privilege log. This details thousands of emails and claims are protected by attorney-client privilege between Epstein and his attorney labeled by the estate as privileged. Rumler appeared in more than 300 emails and as the sender for at least 135. Last month, we reported on emails released by House investigators showing that her name was one of the most frequently referenced in the years following his 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor. Across those messages, Rumler emerged as a confidant and close advisor. In one exchange, Epstein referred to her as, quote, my great defender. Now, Rumler previously told CNN she knew Epstein professionally while working at the law firm Latham & Watkins. She said she never represented him nor was compensated by him and that Epstein reached out to her, quote, informally for legal advice. But the newly unsealed court filing cast light on what Epstein exactly meant. For example, the log asserts that Rumler was on more than a dozen emails in 2015 when Epstein's attorneys tried to push back against allegations made in a tape ABC News interview with one of his most outspoken victims, Virginia Roberts Jouffre. On April 23rd, 2015, the log says that Rumler sent an email to Epstein and another attorney. The email was described as, quote, communication providing draft of a letter to the press seeking to correct the record. The next day, an attorney for Epstein sent a letter to ABC News warning that airing the interview would be, quote, grossly negligent or worse. The interview never aired. Jouffre wrote in her memoir published after she died that she was proud to have done the interview and devastated that it never aired. ABC News pointed CNN to a statement saying, at the time, not all of our reporting met our standards to air, but we have never stopped investigating the story. And a spokesman for Goldman Sachs, where Rumler now works, told CNN, it is irresponsible and wrong for CNN to draw conclusions about the content of communications from brief and generic descriptions of emails you haven't seen. Cathy was not involved in the privileged assertions or the descriptions in the log. As Cathy has told CNN before, she never represented Epstein and never advocated on his behalf to a third party. She was one of many prominent attorneys he informally reached out to for advice.