Kathryn Ruemmler, the former top lawyer at Goldman Sachs, resigned from the firm after the Epstein Files revealed a close relationship between her and Jeffrey Epstein. That alone would be a major story. But here's what makes it extraordinary: Ruemmler wasn't just some corporate attorney. She served as Counsel to the President of the United States — Barack Obama's White House counsel — for three years.
You'd think that detail might lead a few headlines.
It didn't.
Scan the coverage from the legacy press and notice what's missing. According to Breitbart, every major outlet ran a version of the same story — and every one of them scrubbed the Obama connection clean:
Eight outlets. Eight headlines. Not one mentions Obama. Not one mentions the White House. Not one identifies Ruemmler as anything other than a "Goldman Sachs lawyer." The framing is unanimous — and it's a choice.
If Ruemmler had served as White House counsel to a Republican president, every single one of those headlines would have opened with the president's name in bold type. That's not speculation. That's pattern recognition born from decades of watching how the press operates.
Ruemmler didn't just pass through the Obama orbit. She was embedded in it. She joined the Obama White House in January 2009 as the Justice Department's associate deputy attorney general. By January 2010, she'd risen to Principal Deputy White House Counsel. In June 2011, she replaced Bob Bauer as Counsel to the President — one of the most powerful legal positions in the executive branch — and held that role until 2014.
That's roughly six years inside the Obama White House, three of them as the former president's chief legal advisor. A photograph from June 28, 2012, taken by official White House photographer Pete Souza, captures Obama embracing Ruemmler alongside Chief of Staff Jack Lew after learning the Supreme Court had upheld the Affordable Care Act. This wasn't a peripheral figure. This was the inner circle.
Her relationship with Epstein — described as a "post-White House friendship" — apparently ran deep enough that when the Epstein Files surfaced, the disclosures ended her career at Goldman Sachs. Whatever those emails contained, they were damaging enough that one of the most powerful financial institutions on earth decided she had to go.
The media's handling of this story follows a pattern so consistent it barely qualifies as subtle anymore. When the Epstein Files were under wraps, the Biden Administration refused to release them. Now that they're public, the press has settled on a narrative strategy: acknowledge the story just enough to claim coverage, while stripping it of every detail that might embarrass the right people.
Calling Ruemmler a "Goldman Sachs lawyer" is technically accurate. It's also a masterclass in misdirection. Goldman Sachs is her most recent employer. Barack Obama's White House is where she built her career and her reputation. One of those facts explains why she's notable. The other explains why media editors sleep well at night.
Consider the inverse. The Epstein Files have broadly exonerated Donald Trump — a detail the press spent years implying would go the other direction. That inversion alone should be a seismic story. Instead, it's treated as an inconvenient footnote while the connections that actually materialized — connections running through Democratic power structures — get laundered through corporate-sounding headlines.
This isn't one editor at one outlet making a judgment call. It's eight major publications arriving at the same omission independently, or not independently, which is worse. The uniformity is the tell. When every newsroom in America makes the same "mistake" in the same direction, it stops being a mistake.
The press has spent years telling the public that the Epstein saga would implicate the powerful. They were right. They just assumed the powerful would be on the other side. Now that the files point toward Obama's inner circle, the institutional reflex kicks in — minimize, reframe, strip context, move on.
Epstein's 2008 conviction and his subsequent conduct have raised serious questions about who enabled him and who looked the other way. The people in his orbit weren't random. They were lawyers, politicians, financiers — the kinds of people who understand exactly what proximity to a convicted predator means and choose it anyway.
Ruemmler's resignation from Goldman Sachs is not the end of this story. It's the beginning of the questions the press doesn't want to ask. What was the nature of this friendship? When did it start relative to Epstein's conviction? Who else in Obama's circle maintained similar ties? And why did it take the release of the Epstein Files — files the previous administration fought to keep sealed — for any of this to surface?
Those are straightforward journalistic questions. The fact that they aren't being asked tells you everything about who the press exists to protect.
Eight headlines. Zero mentions of Obama. The cover-up isn't hidden. It's right there in the framing.