Former Harvard President and former Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers announced that he is stepping back from all public commitments in an effort “to rebuild trust and repair relationships with the people closest to me.” His decision follows last week’s release of 20,000 emails by the House Oversight Committee, which revealed years of correspondence between convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and several of his associates — including Summers, who exchanged messages with Epstein for more than seven years, up to the day before Epstein’s arrest on July 5, 2019.