Kathryn Ruemmler was the White House counsel — the seniormost attorney in the White House — under Barack Obama. John Kiriakou highlights the Epstein-file emails in which she repeatedly pushed to introduce Jeffrey Epstein to CIA director John Brennan: “you’re gonna love John Brennan… let me introduce you.”[1] He finds it notable that a civilian received a CIA award from Brennan of a kind normally given to those killed in the line of duty, and speculates the bond formed because, as White House counsel, Ruemmler would have been the final legal authority approving the assassinations on the Tuesday-morning kill list — “I think she was into it.”[2][3][4]
The Brennan award email
Among the documents released in 2026 was an email from Ruemmler, then general counsel in the Obama White House, to Jeffrey Epstein: “John Brennan gave me the CIA’s highest honor today. Pretty neat, huh?”[5]
John Kiriakou treats the email as the anomaly that needs explaining. Having spent fifteen years at the CIA, he says he knows what that honour is: it is reserved for officers killed in the line of duty. “So, what in the world could Katherine Remler have possibly done to warrant the CIA’s highest honor?”[5][6]
Career and the Epstein contacts
Kiriakou describes her as having no intelligence background at all: a lawyer who went directly into government at the Justice Department, worked her way up there, and was then brought over by Obama to the White House as counsel.[7]
The documents also show her trying repeatedly to arrange a breakfast or a lunch between Epstein and John Brennan. Kiriakou notes it is not known whether she succeeded: Brennan is not talking, and if there was a reply it was not in the released tranche.[6]
He adds that she had been asked to resign as general counsel of Goldman Sachs in the week before he spoke.[8]
Kiriakou’s theory
His explanation for a classified award to a White House lawyer is that she supplied White House approval for the assassinations agreed at the Tuesday morning kill list meetings — a service that could not be acknowledged in public and so was recognised in a form nobody was supposed to learn about.[9]
The attempts to reach Brennan
Among the material Kiriakou drew from the three-million-document release was Ruemmler’s role as an intermediary. The former White House counsel, “who’s now the general counsel at Goldman Sachs, tried repeatedly to connect Jeffrey Epstein with John Brennan.”[10]
Kiriakou marks the limit of what is known and then gives his own estimate: “we don’t know if that connection took place. I would guess that it probably did — and certainly John Brennan has never said anything about it.”[11]