Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free
Your guide to what Trump’s second term means for Washington, business and the world
Jes Staley and Lawrence Summers were appointed by Jeffrey Epstein as executors of his estate, according to newly released documents that point to deep ties between the influential men and the late sex offender.
The roles given to Staley, the former chief executive of Barclays, and Summers, the former US Treasury secretary, were revealed among thousands of new documents published on Tuesday by the US Department of Justice.
The DoJ releases show that Staley was initially named in January 2012 as Epstein’s “successor executor”, who would assume responsibility for executing the disgraced financier’s will in the event that the appointed executors could not fulfil their duties.
Staley was listed as an “executor” in two further wills, dated September 2013 and November 2014. The last of these also listed Summers as a successor executor.
The cache also contained Epstein’s final will, dated from 2019, in which neither man is listed. Staley’s lawyer and Summers have been approached for comment.
In March, Staley stated in court that he had turned down a request by Epstein to name him as a trustee of his estate and sought to use the refusal as evidence that the two men were not personally close.
Under the terms of the will, the executors of the will and trustees of the estate are separate roles.
“Then we might say the fact that . . . I’d turned down being a trustee for his estate might be indicative that I was not a close personal friend,” he told the court.
The release of documents by the DOJ is the latest in a series of publications in the past week under the terms of the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
The law, enacted last month, ordered the department to hand over all unclassified material in the Epstein case. A series of Epstein’s wills were among the 11,034 documents released overnight.
Earlier this year, Staley failed to overturn a lifetime ban from the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority after a judge ruled the former Barclays chief had “acted without integrity” by approving a misleading letter in 2019 that claimed he did not have a close relationship with Epstein.
The ban prevents Staley from holding senior roles in the UK financial services industry.
The former Barclays boss sought to distance himself from Epstein in court testimony by claiming he had a “close professional” relationship with the sex offender but that they were not friends.
In the 2019 letter to the regulator, the chair of Barclays notified the FCA: “Jes has confirmed to us that he did not have a close relationship with Mr. Epstein.”
Emails released by a congressional committee in November showed Summers’ continuing relationship with Epstein until 2019, when the sex offender died by suicide in a New York prison.
In response to those disclosures, Summers stated that he was “deeply ashamed” of the relationship.
He stepped back from public commitments, including being on the board of OpenAI, his roles at think-tanks and his teaching responsibilities at Harvard University, where he has been a tenured professor since 1983.
Read the full article here
