Video News Clips: In Their Own Words

Stephen A. Smith Warns Democrats Larry Summers Is ‘First Shoe To Drop’ Over Epstein Files

Screenshot/YouTube/Stephen A. Smith

SiriusXM host Stephen A. Smith warned Democrats on “Straight Shooter with Stephen A.” Wednesday that former Clinton-era Treasury Secretary Larry Summers was just the first member of his party to be damaged by his connection to deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Summers decided to back away from public commitments in response to House Democrats publishing over 20,000 emails from Epstein’s estate, some of which indicated that he regularly corresponded with the deceased sex offender from 2013 to 2019. Smith said on his show that President Donald Trump would not have supported the House voting to release the Epstein files if he did not know there was more dirt on Democrats.

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“He said, ‘To hell with it, open the files. I’ll sign to open the files. No problem.’ And the first words that came to my mind was ‘uh oh.’ Because Donald Trump is not going to do that if it’s going to be something that significantly hurts Donald Trump,” Smith said. “He’s going to do it if, dare I say, he’s got something on other people because that is who we know him to be, ladies and gentlemen.”

“And sure enough, one of the first names that came out was Larry Summers … who’d worked on economic policies for [former President] Barack Obama, who was religiously associated with the left, who was still teaching at Harvard, and then ultimately had to step back and step away from public settings and things of that nature, scale back his role within the last 24 hours because he was one of the names that appeared in the Epstein files,” he continued.

Smith noted that the email exchanges showed Summers seeming to seek romantic advice from Epstein regarding a woman he was pursuing at Harvard University, where he previously served as president.

“He was somebody that knew Epstein. He was somebody that kept in constant contact with Epstein. He was somebody that Epstein had influenced and coaxed Epstein into donating millions upon millions of dollars to Harvard University — I mean, in excess of $9 million,” he said. “This is the kind of stuff that was happening. And you found yourself saying, ‘Oh, damn.’ And ladies and gentlemen, I’m here to tell you that’s exactly what you should be thinking. It should be, ‘Oh, damn.’ Because that’s just the first shoe to drop.”

“Why is Larry Summers bothered? Why does he have to step away? Why has his reputation been impugned to some degree? It’s very, very simple when you think about it,” he added. “The reason that it happened was because there were emails, and those emails revealed that this man that had been married for decades was asking Jeffrey Epstein for dating advice.”

Smith added that the emails about the woman took place in 2018, which was years after Epstein had already served a prison sentence for solicitation of prostitution of a minor and just one year before his alleged suicide.

“Ladies and gentlemen, do you really, really think that Donald Trump is going to sign off on releasing the Epstein files and not have a boatload of stuff that he’s going to throw in the Democrats’ direction?” he asked. “At some point in time, we got to fall back to what one of my boys, Jeff Brown in LA, said. He said, ‘Trump has become a verb. The name Trump has become a verb. He’s trumping the Democrats at every turn, playing them like a fiddle.'”

Trump signed the “Epstein Files Transparency Act” into law on Wednesday, ordering Attorney General Pam Bondi to publish all related unclassified Department of Justice documents. Trump’s signing came after Republican Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie and Democratic California Rep. Ro Khanna’s discharge petition garnered the signatures of 218 members of Congress on Nov. 12, allowing the bill to release the Epstein files to move to the House floor.

After months of asserting the push to release the Epstein files was a Democratic hoax, the president reversed course Sunday in a Truth Social post urging House Republicans to vote in support of the legislation. The House passed the legislation Tuesday and the Senate formally passed it on Wednesday.