In text messages sent in 2017, disgraced financier and registered sex offender Jeffrey Epstein appears to position himself as a middleman between President Donald Trump’s administration and Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, even seemingly representing himself as passing on information directly from Trump to Gates through an intermediary.
The messages, which the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released on Wednesday, originated with the Epstein estate. They begin on January 27, 2017, years after Epstein had already pleaded guilty to state prostitution solicitation charges. In them, Epstein purports to show intimate awareness of Trump’s plans for domestic and global public health policy, and to be directly familiar with the president’s thinking.
Trump has continued to claim, as recently as this summer, that he stopped speaking with Epstein around 2004.
The messages are among those in dozens of files that show Epstein texting with prominent figures. According to metadata in the files, the texts were sent using iMessage and then backed up to an Apple computer.
Throughout the exchange in question, Epstein is apparently talking to a longtime associate, physician Melanie Walker, who, according to an online biography at one time, worked for what was then known as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She subsequently worked as an adviser to Gates at bgC3, the entity that would become Gates Ventures. The Gates Foundation and Gates Ventures did not respond to requests for comment.
(The metadata does not name Melanie Walker as the sender of the messages. At one point in a continuous conversation carried on over a period of months, though, the person Epstein is texting with identifies herself as “Melanie” and gives him a new phone number, which is associated with Melanie Walker in public databases. Additionally, the person he’s texting with at one point situates herself at Harborview, a Seattle hospital to which Walker has ties. Melanie Walker did not respond to emails, a phone call, or a text message seeking comment.)
In the first text in the files, Melanie asks Epstein for advice.
“I'm seeing BG tmr. He will be in DC for the Alfalfa dinner but he's got mtgs most of the day including w Jared Kushner. Should I ask him to discuss surgeon general or mention it or wait? Not sure kushner cares about that stuff.” (The Alfalfa Club hosts an annual banquet in DC where political elites and high-powered businesspeople dine and network that Gates did attend in 2017. As they are throughout this article, the text messages here are presented as they appear in the Oversight Committee release.)