The governor and the inventor hold the marquee slots at this week’s Freedom Summit in Manchester. Ayotte arrives with a fresh Epstein donor problem; Kamen returns to a big stage five months after resigning from the nonprofit he spent 37 years building.
UPDATE: Gov. Kelly Ayotte cancelled her appearance at the tech conference last-minute, citing a scheduling conflict, per a source at the event. She had a policy aide speak in her place.
A private New Hampshire tech conference scheduled for this week has two marquee speakers headlining: Republican Gov. Kelly Ayotte and recent Epstein files alum Dean Kamen.
The New Hampshire inventor and businessperson found himself mired in scandal this year after the documents showed more than a decade of his dealings with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Following the revelation, he left Beta Technologies, a publicly traded aviation company, in February, “to avoid potential distractions.” In March, he resigned from FIRST, the youth robotics nonprofit he founded and spent 37 years building into a program that reaches millions of schoolchildren.
Rather than treating his resignations as something that warrants continued scrutiny and necessitates distance, Ayotte has agreed to co-headline a high-profile event with Kamen. She does so as she deals with a fresh Epstein problem of her own.
Granite Post reported on July 22 that she took $13,500 in campaign money from four men named in the files, among them Apollo Global Management co-founder Leon Black, who paid Epstein at least $170 million after his conviction and now faces a subpoenaed House deposition on Sept. 3.
“Kelly can’t run from the company her campaign keeps,” Democratic Party Chair Ray Buckley said then.
Kamen’s scandal is detailed in the Justice Department’s January release: dozens of records covering 2011 to 2014, all after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for sex crimes against minors. Phone calls, traded favors, shared travel. An overnight stay in 2013 on Little St. James, the Caribbean island described as the hub of Epstein’s trafficking of underage girls, followed by a thank-you note for “hosting an incredible visit to a magical place.” And emails from Epstein’s circle arranging to fly people they called “the girls” and “the ladies” aboard Kamen’s plane, the Union Leader reported.
The names are redacted. New Hampshire Public Radio asked Kamen’s companies who they were. No answer came back.
In December, after the first photos surfaced, he told WMUR he had “only limited interactions with Jeffrey Epstein.”
The documents released since show the two in contact for at least 14 years, from a 2003 flight log to texts Epstein sent him as late as 2017, NHPR reported.
Independent reviews at FIRST, the Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute, and Sequel Med Tech all found no evidence of misconduct on Kamen’s part; Sequel’s, conducted by Goodwin Procter, specifically found none involving anyone underage.
A spokesperson for Kamen called any suggestion otherwise “false and misleading.”
He resigned from FIRST anyway, apologizing for “errors in judgement in not avoiding any connection to Jeffrey Epstein.”
The Freedom Summit’s speakers page does not make any mention of his recent scandals, and Kamen is billed as the founder of DEKA Research & Development and FIRST, the organization he walked away from five months ago.
The event runs Aug. 20 and 21 at The Venues at Factory on Willow in Manchester, organized by Granite Bio Innovation and Freedom Village, which announced the lineup July 23.
Ayotte and Kamen have a long political history.
He endorsed her 2016 Senate reelection bid, held a fundraiser for her at his home, and closed out her ad titled “One of Us” by calling her an independent leader fighting for the state, as Granite Post noted when the files first broke.
Ayotte is not the only New Hampshire Republican running this year with ties to Kamen. Trump-endorsed US Senate candidate John E. Sununu told a 2007 Senate hearing that he had “worked for 4 years in a manufacturing capacity for a gentleman named Dean Kamen.”
When the Epstein files broke in February, his campaign put three decades of distance between the two men, telling Granite Post that Sununu left that job in 1996, was never involved with Kamen’s nonprofits, and knew nothing of any relationship between Kamen and Epstein.
Sununu’s name is in the files himself. A May 2010 email from Epstein to biotech investor Boris Nikolic includes the line “john sununu, has good stories.”
His campaign dismissed the mention as a fabrication and said neither Sununu nor his father, who shares his name, ever met or communicated with Epstein or Nikolic. In July, The Washington Post reported that the campaign acknowledged Sununu attended the Doha event referenced in the Epstein-Nikolic emails, after the Senate candidate initially denied ever visiting Qatar.
Days later, Democratic California Rep. Ro Khanna used a swing through the state to demand Sununu “come clean” about his Epstein connections.
