WASHINGTON — Before Bill Gates walked into the closed-door room Wednesday, he made sure he understood exactly what waited for him inside. According to two people affiliated with the Gates Foundation, the Microsoft co-founder had spent weeks preparing for his deposition with Jake Greenberg — the man who, until last December, served as the House Oversight Committee’s chief investigations counsel and personally ran the panel’s inquiry into Jeffrey Epstein.
The arrangement, reported by The New York Times, is not technically illegal. There are revolving-door rules in Washington, and Greenberg would not have been permitted to communicate directly with the committee he so recently left. But government ethics watchdogs were pointed in their assessment of what it means in practice: that one of the world’s wealthiest men hired the person who built the investigation against him to tell him how that investigation works.
“Hearings are supposed to be serious attempts at fact-finding,” Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette of the Project on Government Oversight told the Times. “You would want a process free of any conflicts of interest or influence peddling.” Donald Sherman of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington raised a harder question — whether Greenberg had been part of any internal committee discussions, while still on staff, about inviting Gates to testify. That answer is not publicly known.
The deposition itself was unrecorded. The Republican-led committee agreed not to film Gates, in contrast to the videotaped depositions of Bill and Hillary Clinton and billionaire Les Wexner, both of whom fought subpoenas before appearing. Gates came voluntarily. His legal team, including John Moran, a former Justice Department attorney who helped negotiate the terms of his appearance, secured the off-camera arrangement. The committee said it would release a written transcript in the days following. The timing of that release has not been announced.
Chair James Comer, the Kentucky Republican who formally requested Gates’ testimony in March, told reporters Tuesday that “anything’s on the table.” He described Gates as willing, if not eager. “He hasn’t fought it, and I appreciate that,” Comer said. Greenberg, who built much of the committee’s evidentiary framework before departing for the law firm DLA Piper, was not expected to be present during the deposition itself. Comer’s own testimonial praising Greenberg as “one of Washington’s most capable oversight investigators” remains prominently featured on DLA Piper’s website.
Gates’ appearance came a day after the committee interviewed Lesley Groff, Epstein’s longtime executive assistant, whose name appears in thousands of the Justice Department’s released documents and who has denied any knowledge of or participation in Epstein’s crimes. The sequencing was deliberate. The committee had publicly indicated it wanted to question witnesses in close proximity to Epstein’s operations before turning to the wealthier figures in his orbit. For a breakdown of the protections Groff invoked and what she disclosed, see Eastern Herald’s coverage of that deposition.
Annie Farmer, one of the survivors who has testified publicly that Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell abused her at his New Mexico ranch when she was sixteen, told NPR on Monday that Gates’ relationship with Epstein was longer and more personal than many people understood. “It’s fair for Gates to answer questions about that connection,” she said. But she offered a harder assessment of what the hearings have produced so far: “A lot of people have taken the stance of just wanting to cover for themselves and have not offered real information.” She said she hoped Gates would choose differently.
What the committee has to work with is substantial. Gates’ name appears dozens of times in the nearly 3.5 million documents released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act. A 2013 email in Epstein’s files — apparently composed by Epstein and sent to himself — contains unverified allegations that Gates sought treatment for a sexually transmitted infection contracted during extramarital affairs and asked Epstein’s help concealing that treatment from his then-wife, Melinda French Gates. A Gates Foundation spokesperson called those claims “absolutely absurd and completely false.” In February, Gates told foundation staff he had confided in Epstein about two affairs with Russian women, which Epstein subsequently recorded in his own documents. “I did nothing illicit. I saw nothing illicit,” Gates said at that internal meeting.
French Gates told NPR in February that the documents filled her with “unbelievable sadness” and reflected problems she had faced in her marriage. “Whatever questions remain — those questions are for those people and for even my ex-husband,” she said. “They need to answer to those things, not me.”
The documentary record the committee is working from includes flight logs placing Gates on planes connected to Epstein’s network, records of meetings that continued after Epstein’s 2008 Florida conviction for soliciting a minor for prostitution, and email correspondence between Epstein’s advisers and Gates’ closest associates running until 2019, the year of Epstein’s death in federal custody. Gates has acknowledged the relationship ran from 2011 through 2014, describing it as an effort to leverage Epstein’s wealthy contacts for global health philanthropy. “In retrospect, that was a dead end,” he has said. “Every minute I spent with him I regret.”
The Bondi dimension adds another layer of institutional complexity. Former Attorney General Pam Bondi, who was ousted from the Justice Department in April, testified last month in her own closed-door session. According to the transcript released by the committee, Bondi directed significant responsibility for sloppy redactions in the Epstein file releases toward acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, whom President Trump this week formally nominated for a permanent appointment. Bondi defended the Justice Department’s work, telling the committee it was “committed to accountability and transparency.” Democrats on the panel have called for Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel to face their own subpoenas. For a full account of Bondi’s testimony and what it revealed, see Eastern Herald’s analysis of her deposition.
The committee has not finished its witness list. Along with Gates, Comer’s office has scheduled appearances this summer from billionaire investor Leon Black, former Clinton aide Doug Band, former Goldman Sachs lawyer Kathryn Ruemmler and former Barclays chief executive Jes Staley. Ruemmler resigned from Goldman Sachs over her Epstein ties earlier this year. How much any of them will actually disclose — and how many will arrive having hired from the same institutional talent pool that Gates did — is the question that Wednesday’s deposition left open.
Rep. Yassamin Ansari, an Arizona Democrat on the committee, said before the Gates session that accountability must apply equally regardless of wealth or political affiliation. “No one — regardless of power, political party, or wealth — is above justice.” Whether that holds when the person in question arrives coached by the committee’s own former investigative chief is what the transcript, when the committee releases it, will have to demonstrate.
