Government Corruption News Articles

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An Associated Press investigation drawing on hundreds of court documents, immigration records and interviews in the U.S. and Central America identified holes in the system that allow state court judges to grant custody of migrant children to American families — without notifying their parents. And today, with hundreds of those mothers and fathers deported thousands of miles away, the risk has grown exponentially. More than 300 parents were deported to Central America without their children this summer, many of whom allege they were coerced into signing paperwork they didn't understand, affecting their rights to reunify with their children. Some parents also contended that U.S. officials told them their children would be given up for adoption. "And the reality is that for every parent who is not located, there will be a permanent orphaned child, and that is 100 percent the responsibility of the administration," U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw said in August while overseeing a lawsuit to stop family separations. The AP asked the State Department, as well as embassy officials in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, whether they were working with deported parents to find their children in the U.S.. The State Department deferred to the Department of Homeland Security, which said in a statement: "DHS is not aware of anyone contacting embassy or consulate in a foreign country to be reunified with a child. This is unsurprising given the fact that these parents made a knowing decision to leave their child in a foreign country."

Note: This would seem to amount to child trafficking by the U.S. government. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption from reliable major media sources.

In January 2010 Israeli agents converged on a luxury hotel in Dubai: their target was Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, an arms supplier for Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist movement which controls the Gaza Strip. The mission involved 27 operatives of the Mossad secret service who were posing as tourists or tennis players. The hit team and their watchers flew in from different European airports using false passports. Communications were routed via Austria to avoid surveillance. Mabhouh was killed in his room using a paralysing drug and his body left to be discovered by hotel staff the next day. The snag was that the killing exposed the Mossad to global scrutiny – and angered an Arab country with a record of quiet cooperation with Israel. CCTV caught the agents changing disguises and stalking their prey – seen as a legitimate candidate for extrajudicial execution as he had killed an Israeli soldier and, more importantly, was a logistical link with Iran, sworn enemy of the Jewish state. Ronen Bergman’s account of his country’s targeted assassinations contains a wealth of detail about this and other killings. In recent years Israel has assassinated more people than any other country in the western world. Bergman’s long view sharpens understanding of the asymmetrical nature of the conflict – and of the limits of force. Bergman’s style tends to the sensational but that does not mask a critical strand that questions the morality and effectiveness of Israel’s approach to dealing with the enemy in its own backyard.

Note: Rise and Kill First by Ronen Bergman is available here. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on war and assassinations.

From 2008 to 2010, as Edward Snowden has revealed, the National Security Agency (NSA) collaborated with the British Government Communications Headquarters to intercept the webcam footage of over 1.8 million Yahoo users. The agencies were analyzing images they downloaded from webcams and scanning them for known terrorists who might be using the service to communicate, matching faces from the footage to suspects with the help of a new technology called face recognition. In attempting to find faces, the Pentagon's Optic Nerve program recorded webcam sex by its unknowing targets–up to 11 percent of the material the program collected was "undesirable nudity" that employees were warned not to access. And that's just the beginning of what face recognition technology might mean for us in the digital era. The U.S. government is in the process of building the world's largest cache of face recognition data, with the goal of identifying every person in the country. The creation of such a database would mean that anyone could be tracked wherever his or her face appears, whether it's on a city street or in a mall. Today's laws don't protect Americans from having their webcams scanned for facial data. "If cameras connected to databases can do face recognition, it will become impossible to be anonymous in society," [attorney Jennifer] Lynch says. That means every person in the U.S. would be passively tracked at all times.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.

More than 60 years ago, in his "Foundation" series, the science fiction novelist Isaac Asimov invented a new science – psychohistory – that combined mathematics and psychology to predict the future. Now social scientists are trying to mine the vast resources of the Internet – Web searches and Twitter messages, Facebook and blog posts, the digital location trails generated by billions of cellphones – to do the same thing. The government is showing interest in the idea. This summer a little-known intelligence agency began seeking ideas from academic social scientists and corporations for ways to automatically scan the Internet in 21 Latin American countries for "big data," according to a research proposal. The three-year experiment ... is being financed by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, or Iarpa. The automated data collection system is to focus on patterns of communication, consumption and movement of populations. It will use publicly accessible data, including Web search queries, blog entries, Internet traffic flow, financial market indicators, traffic webcams and changes in Wikipedia entries. It is intended to be an entirely automated system, a "data eye in the sky" without human intervention. Some social scientists and advocates of privacy rights are deeply skeptical of the project, saying it evokes queasy memories of Total Information Awareness, a post-9/11 Pentagon program that proposed hunting for potential attackers by identifying patterns in vast collections of public and private data.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.

The Pentagon is spending more and more research-and-development dollars on weapons that stun, scare, entangle or nauseate – anything but kill. The U.S.'s nonlethal-weapons programs are drawing their own fire, mostly from human-rights activists who contend that the technologies being developed will be deployed to suppress dissent and that they defy international weapons treaties. Imagine a cross between a microwave oven and a Star Trek phaser: a tight, focused beam of energy that flash-heats its target from a distance. Directed energy beams do not burn flesh, but they do create an unbearably painful burning sensation. The Air Force Research Laboratory has already spent $40 million on a humvee-mounted directed-energy weapon. Further out on the horizon, the line between weapons development and science fiction becomes perilously thin. Even their supporters agree that "nonlethal weapons" is a dangerous misnomer. Any of these devices has the potential to injure and kill. A chemical-weapons watchdog organization called the Sunshine Project has obtained evidence that the U.S. is considering some projects that appear to take us beyond the bounds of good sense: bioengineered bacteria designed to eat asphalt, fuel and body armor, or faster-acting, weaponized forms of antidepressants, opiates and so-called "club drugs" that could be rapidly administered to unruly crowds. Such research is illegal under international law and could open up terrifying scenarios for abuse.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on non-lethal weapons from reliable major media sources.

The British government targeted the American civil rights leader Stokely Carmichael and sought to weaken the Black Power movement with covert disinformation campaigns, recently declassified documents have revealed. The effort was the work of a secret unit known as the Information Research Department, based in London and part of the Foreign Office, which created and distributed literature from fake sources as part of a broader effort to destabilise cold war enemies. The effort against Carmichael, a firebrand orator who travelled to west Africa in part to escape harassment by US law enforcement agencies, aimed to portray the prominent Black Power leader as a foreign interloper in Africa who was contemptuous of the inhabitants of the continent. Based mainly in Guinea from July 1969, the 28-year-old activist had became a vocal advocate of socialist, pan-Africanist ideologies, which worried British officials. The IRD was particularly worried by the movement's potential influence in the Caribbean. In 1969, the IRD also created a new fake group: The Organisation of African Students for African Power. This was supposedly based in East Germany and adopted contemporary radical New Left ideas, "proclaiming a plague on both" the capitalist west and the Soviet bloc. The IRD felt this provided a better platform to "damage opponents" than the dated nationalist approach, while being difficult to trace back to Britain because many similar groups had genuinely sprung up in the late 1960s.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the erosion of civil liberties from reliable major media sources.

After her longtime partner died of kidney cancer, federal agents knocked on Gail Deckman's door outside Chicago and told her she was in trouble: She had kept thousands of dollars in Social Security disability benefits that should have stopped when he died. The inspector general's office, which investigates disability fraud and tries to recoup money for the government, ultimately charged her $119,392 – nearly three times what she received in error. The inflated fees were set in motion during the Trump administration, when attorneys in charge of a little-known anti-fraud program run by the inspector general's office levied unprecedented fines against Deckman and more than 100 other beneficiaries without due process. The escalating penalties created a giant jump – at least on paper – in the amount of money the inspector general could show lawmakers it was bringing in. A Chicago woman was fined $132,000 after wrongly receiving as much as $10,618 in benefits. A Denver woman was sanctioned $168,000 after cashing as much as $14,960 in wrongly received checks. The remarkable penalties led to tumult inside the Office of Inspector General Gail Ennis, where a whistleblower was targeted for retaliation, according to a ruling this month. [Deborah] Shaw testified that she was shocked when she was directed in early 2019 to issue a penalty of $176,000 to a woman who had already written a check for $26,000 to repay the government the entire amount she had wrongly received in disability benefits.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption from reliable major media sources.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is conflating the results of two different types of coronavirus tests, distorting several important metrics and providing the country with an inaccurate picture of the state of the pandemic. We’ve learned that the CDC is making, at best, a debilitating mistake: combining test results that diagnose current coronavirus infections with test results that measure whether someone has ever had the virus. The agency confirmed to The Atlantic on Wednesday that it is mixing the results of viral and antibody tests, even though the two tests reveal different information and are used for different reasons. This is not merely a technical error. The upshot is that the government’s disease-fighting agency is overstating the country’s ability to test people who are sick with COVID-19. States have set quantitative guidelines for reopening their economies based on these flawed data points. Several states - including Pennsylvania, the site of one of the country’s largest outbreaks, as well as Texas, Georgia, and Vermont - are blending the data in the same way. Virginia likewise mixed viral and antibody test results until last week, but it reversed course and the governor apologized for the practice. These results damage the public’s ability to understand what is happening in any one state. On a national scale, they call the strength of America’s response to the coronavirus into question. The number of tests conducted nationwide each day has more than doubled in the past month. At the same time, the portion of tests coming back positive has plummeted.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and the coronavirus from reliable major media sources.

Early support from deep-pocketed financial executives could give Democrats seeking to break out of the pack an important fundraising boost. But any association with bankers also opens presidential hopefuls to sharp attacks from an ascendant left. And it’s left senior executives on Wall Street flailing over what to do. “I’m a socially liberal, fiscally conservative centrist who would love to vote for a rational Democrat and get Trump out of the White House,” said the CEO of one of the nation’s largest banks, who, like a dozen other executives interviewed for this story, declined to be identified. After mentioning Bloomberg, Wall Street executives who want Trump out list a consistent roster of appealing nominees that includes former Vice President Joe Biden and Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Kamala Harris of California. Bankers’ biggest fear: The nomination goes to an anti-Wall Street crusader like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) or Sanders. “It can’t be Warren and it can’t be Sanders,” said the CEO of another giant bank. “It has to be someone centrist and someone who can win.” Clearly, they're not afraid that Senator Professor Warren or Bernie Sanders "can't win," but, rather, they're struck into incoherence that one of them can. Somewhere in the gated community holding their souls, they know that there still is a considerable reckoning out there for what they did throughout the Aughts, and that scares them to death. And now, there are popular vehicles through which that reckoning can be wrought. The universe may be shopping for new masters.

Note: Trump promised to drain the swamp of corrupt bankers, only to then appoint many of them to key positions in his administration. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on financial corruption from reliable major media sources. Then explore the excellent, reliable resources provided in our Banking Corruption Information Center.

We all now know the name of Arab journalist Jamal Khashoggi, but very few of us know the name of Arab journalist Tareq Ayoub. An elected president of the United States has been blamed for killing Ayoub. We rightly demand justice in the case of Khashoggi, so why not in the case of Ayoub? On the morning of April 8, 2003, less than three weeks after U.S. President George W. Bush ordered the illegal invasion of Iraq, Al Jazeera reporter Tareq Ayoub was on the rooftop of his network’s Baghdad bureau ... reporting live. An American A-10 Warthog attack jet appeared. “The plane was flying so low that those of us downstairs thought it would land on the roof,” Maher Abdullah, the network’s Baghdad correspondent, later recalled. “We actually heard the rocket being launched. It was a direct hit.” Ayoub was killed. Fifteen minutes later, a second American warplane launched a second missile at the building. But the U.S. government, like the Saudi government in recent weeks, tried to duck responsibility. It was just a “grave mistake,” according to a State Department spokesperson. “This coalition does not target journalists,” a U.S. general told reporters. Al Jazeera’s managing director, Mohammed Jassem al-Ali, had written a letter to the Pentagon less than two months earlier ... providing U.S. officials with the exact address and coordinates of the Baghdad bureau. The U.S. military had bombed Al Jazeera’s Kabul office in November 2001, and the network’s bosses wanted to prevent a repeat of such an incident.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and the manipulation of public perception.

Half buried in the sand, the vast structure looks like a downed UFO. At the summit, figures carved into the weathered concrete state only the year of construction: 1979. Officially, this vast structure is known as the Runit Dome. Locals call it The Tomb. Below the 18-inch concrete cap rests the United States’ cold war legacy to this remote corner of the Pacific Ocean: 111,000 cubic yards of radioactive debris left behind after 12 years of nuclear tests. Sections of concrete have started to crack away. Underground, radioactive waste has already started to leach out of the crater: according to a 2013 report by the US Department of Energy, soil around the dome is already more contaminated than its contents. The US has never formally apologized to the Marshall Islands for turning it into an atomic testing ground. When the UN special rapporteur on human rights and toxic waste, Calin Georgescu, visited the Marshall Islands in 2012 he criticized the US, remarking that the islanders feel like ‘nomads’ in their own country. Nuclear testing, he said, “left a legacy of distrust in the hearts and minds of the Marshallese”. “Why Enewetak?” asked Ading, Enewetak’s exiled senator during an interview in the nation’s capital. “Every day, I have that same question. Why not go to some other atoll in the world? Or why not do it in Nevada, their backyard? I know why. Because they don’t want the burden of having nuclear waste in their backyard. They want the nuclear waste ... thousands miles away. That’s why they picked the Marshall Islands.”

Note: Reports of the effects of the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were systematically suppressed while this nuclear testing occurred. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing government corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.

Defense industry tycoon Palmer Luckey [is] the 33-year-old co-founder of sprawling weapons manufacturer Anduril Industries. A longtime GOP donor and activist who spoke on condition he not be identified in order to preserve his political relationships said Luckey was now the "godfather of Republican fundraising on the west coast". "If you're raising campaign money in California, you have to go to Palmer Luckey," he said. "Luckey is the top tier." Anduril, launched just nine years ago, has emerged as a major military contractor for the Trump administration, working on contracts for everything from drones to autonomous jet fighters to space-based interceptors. In March, the US army awarded a $20bn sole-source contract to Anduril for a variety of drones it sells, though it is not clear which of its weapons systems are operational or have been deployed for combat in US operations. Anduril, though it is not widely known as a space contractor, announced in May it would work, with a team of other companies, on what may be the mother of all contracting opportunities offered by the Trump administration, the so-called "Golden Dome" anti-missile space-based interceptor effort. Estimates for the Golden Dome range between $185bn and $1.2tn. Anduril says in Trump's first year in office it doubled its revenue – a growth rate of 100%, but still only reached $2.2bn for 2025, which is barely a blip in the Pentagon's trillion-dollar budget.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and warfare technology.

US Customs and Border Protection is seeking to hire private investigators to track down deported immigrants and others who have left the United States, and press them into paying the government money, according to records reviewed by WIRED. The work would cover Mexico, Honduras, and Guatemala, and potentially other countries. The documents, which cap the so-called Tracing and Payment Recovery Services program at $9 million over the next two years, call for "commercial data verification and physical observation services" to confirm where each person lives. As of July, the Department of Homeland Security, CBP's parent agency, says it has issued more than $84 billion in fines to immigrants it has accused of failing to depart the United States. Those fines run against people who are still in the country, at $998 a day for up to five years. Some have reached up to $1.8 million. Hasan Shafiqullah, the Legal Aid Society's immigration supervising attorney, says he's seen some third-party collection agencies add $500,000 in additional administrative fees on top of the US government's fees. Immigrants accused of failing to depart have had their tax returns seized, their wages garnished, and their credit scores ruined. DHS promises that it will forgive failure-to-depart fines if people self-deport using the CBP Home app. The waiver does not include a separate $5,130 fee Congress created last year for people ordered removed in absentia and later arrested by ICE.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on immigration enforcement corruption and the disappearance of privacy.

The US Army is about to make a working laser weapon an official part of its arsenal. The Pentagon is poised to sign a contract to acquire and rapidly deploy what's called an Enduring High Energy Laser in and around bases across the world to defend them from drone attacks. It will mark the first time that the US military will have committed to equipping its forces with laser weapons in significant numbers. The US military, at this moment, has either deployed or is actively testing a half-dozen laser weapons systems. The deployments haven't all gone great. Four vehicles equipped with Raytheon air-defense lasers were yanked from the Middle East after poor reviews from soldiers. One laser, built by the defense contractor AeroVironment and positioned along the southern US border, accidentally zapped a party balloon in February, causing the Federal Aviation Administration to briefly close the airspace around El Paso, Texas. Once it was reopened, the laser shot down a Border Patrol drone by mistake. Despite such mishaps, the Army appears ready to go beyond the one-offs and the experiments. The Pentagon and its suppliers had been scrambling to field something, anything to defend against mass-produced, low-cost attack drones. They've rolled out radio frequency jammers, microwave weapons, an array of missiles, drones designed to kill other drones, even copies of the Iranian robots. None of them ... have been enough.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on military corruption and warfare technology.

[Annie] Jacobsen's new book, "Biological War: A Scenario" ... is a heavily researched book about contagious and potentially civilization-ending pathogens. Though banned by international treaty, these germs have been weaponized and hoarded by countries that include Russia, North Korea and Syria. Jacobsen has interviewed everyone, from former high-ranking members of the military, the C.I.A., FEMA and NATO to former secretaries of defense, counterterrorism experts, epidemiologists and Sam [expletive] Altman. That so many were willing to talk to her, and have their names affixed to this book, indicates the esteem in which she is held. "Biological War" is fact-based except for Jacobsen's assumption that our leaders have experience, knowledge, integrity and empathy. The infectious killer this book describes, I am sorry to say, exists. It's what's referred to as a chimera pathogen, alive and airborne, a booby-trapped hybrid of two or more viruses. In this case, the infected person first experiences a long wave of euphoria, of the sort that makes one want to rush out and dance with somebody. Later, the suffering begins. Bubbly pink sputum, hacked up bits of lung, "bestial noises," stenches on airplanes mistaken for dirty diapers. This pathogen is engineered to destroy trust in medicine. If a patient is given antibiotics – these would barely help anyway – the disease mutates into a form of deadly encephalitis.

Note: In 1977, a US Senate investigation revealed that, during the Cold War, the Army had secretly conducted at least 239 biological warfare tests by releasing bacteria into American cities and public transportation systems. In one experiment, a bacterial cloud released over the San Francisco Bay Area exposed hundreds of thousands of people, contributing to illnesses and death, and lasting changes to the region's microbial ecology. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on weapons of mass destruction, biotech dangers, and science corruption.

The Pentagon is asking Congress for broad new authority to withhold unclassified records from the public, a proposal that transparency advocates say could significantly reduce the public's ability to scrutinize the nation's largest federal agency and understand how billions of taxpayer dollars are spent. The legislative proposal seeks to create a new section of federal law allowing the defense secretary to exempt certain "controlled unclassified information," or CUI, from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act if the U.S. military determines the records concern national defense vulnerabilities and concludes that the harm from disclosure outweighs the public interest. Brett Max Kaufman, senior counsel with American Civil Liberties Union's Center for Democracy, [said] that for decades, there has been "a massive overclassification problem throughout the executive branch." "The last thing the government needs is a new power to withhold information under the FOIA," Kaufman wrote. If adopted, the legislation would become part of a FOIA system that has long suffered from chronic delays. The most recent annual Pentagon FOIA report said that at the end of the 2025 fiscal year, there were 30,476 backlogged requests, a 42% increase from 2024. Although FOIA requires agencies to respond within 20 working days in most cases, requests can remain pending for months or years, forcing petitioners to enter into costly litigation to compel agencies to act.

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The Department of Justice (DOJ) declined Thursday to release additional unredacted records from its investigation into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, telling a federal judge that it has already adequately complied with the law. The DOJ's response came in the final hours of a court-ordered deadline to remove redactions in at least a dozen documents or "show cause" why it could not. Those documents included "at least eight email exchanges with Mr. Epstein regarding a ‘torture video' and sexual activity with young women, including minors" and interviews with a woman who claims she was abused by President Trump as a minor. The filing pointed to exemptions in the law that allowed the DOJ to withhold or redact records that contained victims' identities and information that could jeopardize a federal investigation, among a few other exceptions. The Justice Department argued that it should not be forced to release any further records to the public but offered to share additional details with the judge in closed-door proceedings. It also asked for a 60-day extension so that the solicitor general can consider a possible appeal, if further action is demanded. The filing comes in a lawsuit from attorney and independent journalist Katie Phang, in which she alleged that the DOJ has violated the transparency law by withholding information. [Attorney General Todd] Blanche has repeatedly defended the administration's handling and rollout of the files.

Note: Don't miss part one and part two of our investigations into the Epstein files so far. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Jeffrey Epstein.

Humanity has officially passed a grim milestone: the first confirmed death at the hands of a fully-autonomous robot weapon. A senior figure involved in the Ukrainian defence industry admitted that a fully autonomous drone deployed to the front lines of the Russo-Ukranian war has claimed human lives. The event has been kept under wraps for two years, Ukrainian drone maker Alexander Kokhanovskyy said. The device itself was a quadcopter drone designed to zip to the front line, loiter around a perimeter for roughly 10 minutes, then launch into "terminator mode." This mode, the Ukranian drone expert explained, involves the use of an unidentified AI model to automatically seek out and attack human targets. During the operation in question ... it identified and ultimately attacked "a couple of [Russian] soldiers" and "one truck." "We just launch it and we know everything will be dead," Kokhanovskyy [said]. "There is no connection to the drone at all ... everything it sees will be killed." While this marks the first known strike of its kind, it's fair to say the world's militaries have been inching toward this for a while. The Israeli Defence Forces, for example, have long deployed loitering suicide drones to hover over various demarcation zones across Palestine. More recently, US military operatives used Anthropic's Claude to select bombing targets across Iran. If Kokhanovskyy is to be believed, humanity has crossed a threshold that can never be uncrossed.

Note: This is being called AI's "Oppenheimer moment". For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on war and artificial intelligence.

For decades, Congress has tried and failed to give Americans control over their own personal data: the right to see it, correct it, and delete it at will. This inaction has left Americans with no recourse against misuse of their own data, while the data broker industry quietly continues to collect and sell the personal information of millions, operating in a largely unchecked gray market. Now, two new bills, the SECURE Data Act and the GUARD Financial Data Act, offer the latest test of whether Washington can step up and finally pull data brokers out of the shadows and into the reach of the law. Efforts to prevent the SECURE Data Act – or any federal protections – from being enacted are currently on full display. Exacerbating the situation and further endangering consumers, there is an entire category of companies that have deliberately avoided being classified as data brokers in an effort to skirt even the patchwork of state-level regulations. Unlike traditional data brokers, massive data aggregators don't sell your name and address to the highest bidder. Instead, they operate quietly, harvesting your data from across the internet, then assembling it into risk scores, behavioral profiles, and assessments of your creditworthiness. These opaque calculations increasingly govern your real-world outcomes, including whether you're approved for a mortgage, the interest rates on your auto loan, and what services or products are marketed to you.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy.

The former chief investigations counsel for the House Oversight Committee has been helping to prepare Bill Gates, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, to testify privately in the panel's Jeffrey Epstein investigation on Wednesday. Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, the Republican chairman of the committee, formally requested in March that Mr. Gates appear before the committee for a transcribed interview. His request came after files released by the Justice Department showed that Mr. Gates met with Mr. Epstein, the convicted sex offender, multiple times and that his closest advisers were in frequent contact with the disgraced financier until 2019, the year of his death in prison. In preparing for the deposition, Mr. Gates has turned to Jake Greenberg, who until December was spearheading the oversight panel's Epstein inquiry in his role as the committee's top investigative official. Mr. Gates's close relationship with Mr. Epstein has roiled his foundation, which has authorized an outside review of its ties to Mr. Epstein. Representative Suhas Subramanyam, Democrat of Virginia, said in an interview that he wanted to know what Mr. Gates "knew of Epstein's crimes, and the nature and extent of their relationship." He added, "Epstein was known for befriending and even blackmailing rich and powerful men, and I want to know if Gates was one of them." Mr. Gates has sought out powerful inside players to help him weather the scrutiny. He hired John Moran, a former lawyer for the Justice Department, who helped him secure an agreement with the committee for him to appear off camera, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Note: Don't miss part one and part two of our investigations into the Epstein files so far. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and Jeffrey Epstein.

Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.