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February 13, 2026

Good morning. Andrew here. We’re going behind the scenes of the resignation of Kathryn Ruemmler as Goldman Sachs’s general counsel, amid revelations from the Epstein files that have roiled the firm for weeks.

We’re also looking at another departure this A.M. — that of Gail Slater, the leader of the Justice Department’s antitrust division — and what it means for deal-making. And we have a fun Q.&A. with the chief of HPE on how he uses A.I. (Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up here.)

Kathryn Ruemmler, Goldman Sachs’s top in-house lawyer whose ties to Jeffrey Epstein have become a major talking point on Wall Street, has announced her resignation. Charles Dharapak/Associated Press

Goldman’s top lawyer heads for the exit

Another giant of corporate America has fallen because of ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

Kathryn Ruemmler, Goldman Sachs’s general counsel, will step down in June, after explosive news about her ties to the convicted sex offender emerged from the Justice Department’s latest release of Epstein files.

Her planned departure comes after weeks of growing scrutiny.

The context: The agency’s disclosures have led to repercussions across Washington, Wall Street, Hollywood and Europe. Brad Karp, the longtime C.E.O. adviser, resigned as chair of the law firm Paul Weiss; Casey Wasserman, the entertainment mogul, has lost prominent clients; and Steve Tisch, the co-owner of the New York Giants, is undergoing scrutiny by the N.F.L.

Just in: Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, the C.E.O. of the Dubai-based ports giant DP World, is stepping down after his exchanges with Epstein became public.

Newly published documents showed closer ties between Ruemmler and Epstein. News reports had already documented how Ruemmler, a superstar litigator who worked in the Obama administration, had been in the disgraced financier’s orbit. But the latest Justice Department release revealed a trove of communication between the two, including about potential jobs, her romantic life and gifts Epstein had given her. (She called him “sweetie” and “Uncle Jeffrey.”)

Goldman and Ruemmler have said that Epstein was never her client. But the newly released documents showed that she helped him edit a legal document defending his 2008 agreement to plead guilty to soliciting prostitution from a minor, and that she coordinated strategy for a planned ABC News segment featuring the Epstein accuser Virginia Roberts Giuffre. (The segment never aired.)

Reports suggest tensions were growing at Goldman regarding Ruemmler. She was front and center at a meeting of the firm’s partners last week, suggesting that her job wasn’t in jeopardy, according to The Times. And the firm worked with the prominent defamation lawyer Tom Clare, who pushed back on reporters’ descriptions of Ruemmler’s relationship with Epstein. (Goldman had denied a Wall Street Journal report that John Rogers, the firm’s powerful board secretary, had worked on a departure plan for Ruemmler.)

But many Goldman executives were baffled by the show of support, The Times and other news outlets reported. And an unidentified source described as being close to a Goldman director told The Financial Times that the Ruemmler scandal was an embarrassing distraction.

In a memo announcing Ruemmler’s planned departure, David Solomon, Goldman’s C.E.O., described her as “an extraordinary general counsel” and that “she will be missed.”

Global stocks sell off ahead of today’s U.S. inflation report. S&P 500 futures are down today, as are markets in Asia and parts of Europe, after yesterday’s rout in tech stocks. (Traders blamed the so-called artificial intelligence scare trade for the rout.) Wall Street will be closely watching today’s Consumer Price Index report, which is expected to show that inflation is cooling slightly.

Anthropic clinches a $380 billion valuation as I.P.O. anticipation grows. The A.I. start-up, whose Claude models spurred many of the fears rocking public stocks, closed a $30 billion fund-raising round that included support from Nvidia and Microsoft. (Both tech companies, as well as several venture capital firms, have also invested in OpenAI.) Anthropic’s valuation has roughly doubled since September, as the company pursues an I.P.O. as soon as this year.

The Department of Homeland Security faces a shutdown. Senate Democrats blocked a spending bill yesterday to fund the agency, arguing that the legislation did not include their demands for new restrictions on federal immigration agents. Hours before the vote, Tom Homan, President Trump’s border czar, said that the administration would pull immigration agents from Minnesota.

U.S. consumers and companies pay the brunt of the Trump tariffs, data shows. American households and firms have paid about 90 percent of levies through November in the form of higher prices, according to new research by the New York Fed and Columbia University, contradicting the president’s claim that importers shouldered the cost. Fearing consumer backlash, the Trump administration is said to be weighing scaling back some steel and aluminum tariffs, The Financial Times reports.

A wild west for M.&A. from now on?

After just under a year on the job, one of President Trump’s top competition cops is leaving.

The departure of Gail Slater, who led the Justice Department’s antitrust division, raises questions about how the Trump administration will police proposed mergers now — and whether the process will become more overtly political.

Slater initially started the job with plenty of support. A longtime Washington lawyer who had advised JD Vance when he was a senator, she was expected to be an antitrust enforcer who would generally be more permissive toward M.&A. — except when it came to tech giants.

That didn’t seem to bother Trump: “Big Tech has run wild for years, stifling competition in our most innovative sector,” he wrote in December 2024, announcing Slater as his pick for the Justice Department role.

But politics has mattered as much as antitrust theory. Some deal makers have taken to arguing for their mergers directly to Trump officials or those in the president’s orbit, often traveling to the White House or Mar-a-Lago in Florida. (Consider that the C.E.O.s of Netflix and Paramount, both vying for control of Warner Bros. Discovery, have met with Trump.)

Other Trump competition officials have tended to hew closer to the White House line. Brendan Carr, the head of the F.C.C., backed Nexstar’s $3.5 billion takeover of Tegna soon after the president did.

Slater’s role was seen to be shrinking. Last summer, the Justice Department agreed to approve HPE’s $14 billion takeover of Juniper Networks, months after the agency had sued to block the deal. Slater was skeptical of clearing the transaction on antitrust grounds, but was overruled.

Two of Slater’s deputies were fired shortly after the settlement. One, Roger Alford, later said the men had been dismissed because of lobbyists pressing senior Justice Department officials.

What lies ahead: DealBook hears that some legal M.&A. advisers think Slater’s departure makes their jobs harder, at least in the short term.

When the fate of deals depends more on political considerations than just traditional antitrust metrics, expertise in matters like the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index matter a lot less — and the endgames become a lot less predictable.

Breaking away

For years, European officials have been sounding the alarm to no avail over the continent’s reliance on American tech and financial services. Case in point: Nearly two-thirds of every card transaction in the Eurozone is handled by non-European companies, almost all by Visa or Mastercard.

Now, President Trump’s trade war — as well as his threats to annex Greenland — is restarting interest in efforts within the E.U. to develop rival platforms for European businesses and consumers. That includes a sovereign payment system to handle trillions of dollars in transactions, Vivienne Walt reports.

Distrust between Brussels and Washington is sky-high. Europeans are openly discussing ways to wean themselves off American weapons and software, Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet service and to sell American financial assets like Treasury bonds.

The big decoupling question is expected to loom large at the Munich Security Conference, which begins in Germany today.

“We have seen things that are unthinkable,” Piero Cipollone, an executive board member of the European Central Bank, told DealBook.

Creating a European sovereign payment system is long overdue, Cipollone said. Banks in 13 eurozone countries offer their customers debit cards that are valid only for domestic purchases. Cipollone likens that to being unable to pay for a Starbucks coffee in Seattle using your New York bank card.

“We are highly dependent on” on international payment systems, Martina Weimert, C.E.O. of the European Payments Initiative, told The Financial Times this month. The E.P.I. is a consortium of 16 European banks and financial services companies that in 2024 introduced the Wero, a kind of Apple Pay competitor that has failed to gain much traction.

“We don’t have anything cross-border,” Weimert added, as she urged the industry to get serious about taking on the Visa-Mastercard duopoly.

There is also a big push for a digital euro. Think of it as a smartphone wallet for digital cash that can be tied to people’s bank accounts. It would work across the euro bloc — and, most important, cut out the need for American financial firms. (Banks, however, are worried about the digital euro eating into their deposits.)

E.U. politicians this week voted in favor of the initiative, which is expected to be available widely by 2029.

The project has the backing of the European Central Bank as well. Christine Lagarde, the E.C.B. president, argued this week that the digital euro would be free of “dependency on foreign providers for payment systems” — though she didn’t name Visa or Mastercard — and called it “critical to the functioning of our economy.”

Talking A.I. with the Head of HPE

Every week, we’re asking a leader about artificial intelligence. Antonio Neri, who leads the enterprise technology company HPE, told The Times’s Jordyn Holman that he uses A.I. to prepare for earnings calls. His answers have been condensed and edited.

How are you personally using A.I.?

I use it more to understand the psychology of The Street, to be honest with you.

Wall Street?

If you think about Wall Street — how trading is done, how communications are delivered — every word matters. Every word gets picked apart. They even measure your intonation. I have an accent, so it makes it a little bit challenging. Marie Myers, our C.F.O., has done a fantastic job deploying A.I. tools.

So how are you prompting the A.I.?

There is a consensus that gets developed. That consensus is based on a series of data and reports that people write on the sell side, the financial community side. There is a series of reactions in the last few earnings about our messaging.

So we put it all together and we said, “OK, what are the sweet spots that this community is interested in, and how can we be more efficient in delivering our message?”

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