What Bill Gates Knew
The Epstein Files and the Pandemic-Finance Architecture He Anchored
The system had many nodes. Epstein was the masternode. The living ones are accountable.
Gates did not merely attend meetings. He approved structures. He directed foundation resources. His private office coordinated with Epstein while the foundation’s public posture distanced itself from him. That duality is documented.
Part 9 of the Epstein Files Investigation Series
SAYER JI · FEB 25, 2026
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Executive Summary
Gates has now confirmed the relationship the documents describe. On February 25, 2026, Bill Gates told Foundation staff he maintained years of post-conviction meetings with Epstein, flew on his jet, had two extramarital affairs Epstein discovered, and brought Foundation executives into the orbit.¹ This lends significant plausibility to a previously dismissed Epstein draft letter alleging leverage — a letter many analysts believed was either fabricated or an attempted blackmail instrument.² But the affairs are not the story. The architecture is.
The Epstein files reveal a system, not a scandal. Across eight investigations and thousands of EFTA-numbered documents, the pattern is not one compromised billionaire making bad choices. It is an operational infrastructure — financial instruments, intelligence channels, diplomatic access, personnel placement, and narrative control — structured in a way that concentrated influence over pandemic preparedness, vaccine finance, and global health governance. Epstein was the masternode. But masternodes serve a network. And the living nodes are the ones who are accountable.³
The accountability extends far beyond Gates. The Clinton Foundation, which is deeply involved in global vaccine programs, received Epstein-linked funding and was co-founded with direct Maxwell involvement. Epstein's attorneys stated during his 2007 plea negotiations that he "was part of the original group that conceived the Clinton Global Initiative."⁴ The dark money infrastructure — Arabella Advisors ($3.7 billion in 2020 alone), Tides Foundation, Open Society Foundations — funded the censorship apparatus that suppressed public inquiry into these very relationships.⁵ What did these organizations know? When did they know it? What did they deploy against the American public?
The censorship was not about twelve people. It was about an agenda. The “Disinformation Dozen” report, the ISD reports, the NewsGuard ratings — these were not responses to fringe conspiracy theorists. They were instruments deployed to prevent public interrogation of a financial architecture that the federal documentary record now confirms existed. The people targeted were representative of millions who were asking legitimate questions. The question is no longer whether the architecture existed. It is who built the protection around it — and why.⁶
What Today’s Admission Tells Us — And What It Doesn’t
Bill Gates told his Foundation staff on February 25, 2026, that he had two affairs with Russian women — “a Russian bridge player” and “a Russian nuclear physicist” — and that Epstein learned about them.⁷ He flew on Epstein’s jet. He met with him repeatedly after the 2008 conviction in the US and abroad. His ex-wife Melinda warned him in 2013.⁸ He kept going.
This matters for one specific reason: it lends plausibility to the letter that surfaced in the EFTA release — the letter many believed Epstein drafted either to himself or as a blackmail instrument — which alleged that Epstein had leverage over Gates related to extramarital affairs and their consequences.⁹ When that letter surfaced, the Gates spokesperson called the claims “absolutely absurd and completely false.”¹⁰ Today, Gates confirmed the affairs. The letter’s core allegation — that Epstein possessed compromising information about Gates — now has documentary corroboration from Gates himself.
But this article is not about the affairs. If we focus on the psychobiographical and moralistic dimensions, we risk overlooking the operational architecture now emerging by fixating on one — albeit quite loathed — man’s personal failures.
Weeks after Epstein documented his knowledge of Gates's affairs in writing, Gates signed a legal agreement on August 8, 2013. Five years after Epstein’s conviction for soliciting a minor he signed a legal agreement specifically requesting that Epstein personally serve as Nikolic’s representative in termination negotiations covering bgc3, the Gates Foundation, and all affiliated entities, granting Epstein broad indemnification and ongoing access to confidential information about Gates’s private office and its affiliates. Gates had the resources to engage anyone on earth. He chose a registered sex offender and put it in writing. [EFTA01106142]
One clear takeaway from the affairs is that Epstein had leverage over Gates. The documents tell us what that leverage might have been used for: the financial architecture, the intelligence channels, the personnel placement, the narrative control — a system that extends far beyond one man’s confession to his employees. The Project Molecule documents, which I analyzed in Part 2 of this series, show Epstein designing a charitable fund vehicle for Gates anchored at JPMorgan — a structure built, in Epstein’s own words, to make “the money-making parts arms length” from a charitable organization. That architecture, and what it was designed to produce, is what upcoming Congressional inquiries should be examining.
Epstein was the masternode of a network. He is dead. The network is not. The living nodes — the individuals and institutions that designed, funded, operated, and protected the architecture — are the ones who owe answers. Not about their personal morality. About the system they built.
The System: Five Operational Layers
Across eight investigations, the documentary record reveals not a series of isolated relationships but a multi-layered system. Each layer served a specific function. Together, they constituted an architecture that was designed to produce outcomes in pandemic preparedness, vaccine finance, and global health governance — and to operate beyond the reach of public oversight.
Layer 1: The Financial Architecture
The JPMorgan fund architecture documented in the EFTA files was built for Gates as the anchor client. The proposal is titled “The Gates & J.P. Morgan Charitable Giving Fund.” Epstein designed the structure, coached the bank on Gates’s psychology, and identified the core design problem: ”The tension is making money from a Charitable Org. Therefore the money making parts need to be arms length.”¹¹
This is not one man’s corruption. This is a structural innovation in how charitable vehicles generate private returns under philanthropic cover — donor-advised funds with offshore arms, perpetual duration, and donor anonymity. The $150 million budget included $20 million to “finance the surveillance network in Pakistan.”¹² The Global Health Investment Fund offered 5–7% returns with a 60% principal guarantee from the Gates Foundation.¹³ CEPI received $460 million to compress vaccine development timelines to under twelve months.¹⁴
The question for the living participants: Who approved these structures? Who benefits from the returns? And why did the architecture require a convicted intermediary when every institution involved had unlimited access to legitimate alternatives?
Layer 2: The Intelligence Channel
Between March 2013 and March 2015, confidential field intelligence from Pakistan’s tribal areas — Taliban negotiation plans, military assessments, reports on CIA drone strikes complicating polio negotiations — was systematically routed through Epstein’s personal Gmail.¹⁵ The material was produced by IPI’s field researcher Nasra Hassan, forwarded by IPI president Terje Rød-Larsen to Epstein, and in some cases relayed onward to Gates’s private office bgc3.¹⁶
When Hassan wrote “Urgent, Confi, plz pass on to Bill Gates,” it went to Epstein.¹⁷ When Rød-Larsen forwarded IPI’s grant correspondence with the Gates Foundation, Epstein demanded pre-approval: ”do not send anything else, anything! without letting me see it before it goes not after.”¹⁸
The question for the living participants: Norwegian police are now investigating Rød-Larsen for “aggravated corruption.” The Gates Foundation had no mechanism to detect the compromise. Who else in this chain knew? And what was the intelligence used for?
Layer 3: The Private Office Bridge
The most sensitive operational connections ran not through the regulated Gates Foundation but through bgc3, Gates’s private investment office — the entity with the fewest oversight obligations.¹⁹ Boris Nikolic (bgc3) solicited Epstein’s help on polio security. Larry Cohen (bgc3) coordinated DAF strategy with Epstein. A bgc3 scope document listing “strain pandemic simulation” as a deliverable was forwarded to Epstein.²⁰ Cohen was still fielding Epstein’s access-brokering requests in January 2018.²¹
This structure — a regulated foundation generating intelligence and programs, a private office managing strategy and sensitive operations, a convicted intermediary bridging them — is not unique to Gates. It is a template. The question is how many other nodes in the network used the same architecture: regulated public entity for legitimacy, private vehicle for operations, compromised intermediary for access.
Layer 4: The Clinton Node
The Epstein-Clinton connection is older and in some ways more direct than the Epstein-Gates connection — and it intersects with the same institutional channels.
Epstein’s attorneys stated during his 2007 plea negotiations that he ”was part of the original group that conceived the Clinton Global Initiative.”²² Ghislaine Maxwell arranged to wire $1 million to pay Publicis for its work on “the Clinton project” — the inaugural CGI conference — and Epstein was aware of the payment.²³ The Clinton Foundation acknowledged accepting a $25,000 donation from an Epstein-affiliated foundation in 2006.²⁴ Epstein donated $10,000 to the White House Historical Association, $20,000 to Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign, and visited the White House at least 17 times during Clinton’s presidency.²⁵ Flight logs document Clinton on at least 26 individual flight legs aboard Epstein’s aircraft.²⁶
During a 2016 deposition, Epstein invoked the Fifth Amendment repeatedly when asked about his relationship with Clinton or the Clinton Foundation.²⁷
The Clinton Foundation — like the Gates Foundation — is deeply involved in global health. The Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) has been a major player in vaccine distribution, HIV/AIDS treatment, and health systems in developing countries. The question that has never been adequately answered: What was the operational relationship between Epstein’s financial architecture and the Clinton Foundation’s global health programs? Were there overlapping personnel, shared intelligence channels, or coordinated funding strategies? Why did Epstein conceive part of CGI? What was the $1 million for?
According to Senate Judiciary disclosures and contemporaneous reporting, FBI field agents had developed evidence in a Clinton Foundation investigation for a criminal case against the Clinton Foundation in the mid-2010s, including a cooperating witness who recorded conversations with a Foundation associate — Deputy AG Sally Yates directed prosecutors to 'shut it down' and McCabe ordered no investigative steps without his approval.⁸ This is not ancient history. These are open questions about living institutions.
Layer 5: The Protection Architecture
This is the layer that connects the operational network to the censorship apparatus — and it is the layer that should concern every American regardless of political affiliation.
When the pandemic arrived, the same names that appear in the Epstein financial architecture — Gates, Soros, the Rothschilds — appeared in a May 2020 ISD report that classified public discussion of their pandemic involvement as ”far-right extremism.”²⁹ ISD’s founding board included a Rothschild bank director. Its funding included grants from the Gates Foundation and Open Society Foundations.³⁰
The following year, CCDH published the “Disinformation Dozen” report. The President of the United States declared that the people named were “killing people.” Facebook’s internal analysis later found the statistical claims exaggerated by a factor of at least 1,300.³¹
But the twelve people named were never the point. They were representative — stand-ins for the millions of Americans who were asking questions about pandemic profiteering, vaccine liability, emergency governance, and the financial interests behind public health policy. The censorship apparatus was not designed to silence twelve publishers. It was designed to make an entire category of inquiry socially and professionally radioactive.
And the infrastructure behind it was vast:
Arabella Advisors — founded by Clinton administration veteran Eric Kessler — managed a network that took in $3.7 billion in 2020 alone through entities including the New Venture Fund, Sixteen Thirty Fund, Hopewell Fund, and Windward Fund. These entities funded “misinformation” research that overwhelmingly targeted speech critical of institutional pandemic response, and recommended censorship as a solution.³² The Gates Foundation was a significant funder of Arabella-managed entities — until it quietly severed the relationship in 2025.³³ Arabella Advisors restructured its operations under the name Sunflower Services in late 2025.³⁴
The Tides Foundation — receiving from Soros’s Open Society Foundations, Omidyar’s Democracy Fund, and the Ford, Rockefeller, and Hewlett Foundations — served as a pass-through for funding that ultimately reached organizations involved in content moderation advocacy, platform policy, and “trust and safety” infrastructure.³⁵
Open Society Foundations — Soros’s $32 billion philanthropic network — funded ISD, media literacy initiatives, and organizations that shaped the definitional framework for “misinformation” and “disinformation” that platforms then used to enforce content policies.³⁶
These are publicly traceable funding flows through registered nonprofits with IRS filings. The architecture is documented. The question is what it was deployed to protect.
And now we know what it was protecting. It was protecting the operational layer — the financial instruments, the intelligence channels, the personnel placement, the institutional capture — from public scrutiny. It was ensuring that the questions the Epstein files would eventually answer could not be asked while the architecture was still functioning.
Dive deeper by reading my recent investigation into the topic:
The Military Coordination Layer
The censorship infrastructure did not operate independently of the state. The coordination between government agencies, military information operations, and the NGO censorship apparatus — what researchers have documented as the “censorship industrial complex” — is now a matter of congressional record.³⁷
The Stanford Internet Observatory, the Election Integrity Partnership, the Virality Project — these were not independent academic initiatives. They were federally coordinated efforts that used NGO cutouts to flag, suppress, and remove speech that contradicted official public health narratives.³⁸
The Virality Project specifically recommended that platforms treat “stories of true vaccine side effects” as actionable misinformation — meaning that truthful speech about real medical outcomes was targeted for suppression.³⁹
This infrastructure was funded by the same philanthropic networks documented in the Epstein files. It was staffed by personnel who moved between government, academia, and the NGO sector. And it was deployed against the American public during the same period that the operational architecture the files now reveal was at its most active.
What did the military and intelligence community know about the Epstein network’s intersection with pandemic preparedness? The NCA intelligence disseminations documented in Part 5 of this series show that British financial systems were capturing Epstein-related transactions that the FBI may not have possessed.⁴⁰ FinCEN deconflicted 45 names against an active investigation file in 2023.⁴¹ DARPA’s pandemic preparedness programs intersected with the Gates network through overlapping personnel and advisory relationships.⁴²
The question is not whether these systems existed in isolation. The question is whether the censorship apparatus and the operational architecture it protected were coordinated — and if so, by whom.
What the Living Nodes Owe
Epstein is dead. He cannot testify. He cannot be cross-examined. He cannot explain why the architecture was designed the way it was.
But the living nodes can.
Bill Gates — who today confirmed the relationship, the leverage, and the years of concealment — has been formally called to testify before the House Oversight Committee by Rep. Nancy Mace. His ex-wife stated publicly: “He needs to answer to those things, not me.”⁴³
The Clinton Foundation — which received Epstein-linked funding, co-conceived CGI with his involvement, and operates global health programs that overlap with the same institutional channels — has never been subjected to a public accounting of its operational relationship with Epstein’s network. The FBI investigation was shut down. The 2016 deposition produced only Fifth Amendment invocations.⁴⁴
Arabella Advisors — now “ceased operations” and restructured — channeled billions through entities that funded the censorship apparatus protecting these networks from scrutiny. Its founder is a Clinton administration veteran. The Gates Foundation was a major funder. What were the specific grants that funded content moderation, “misinformation” research, and platform censorship policy during the pandemic — and who approved them?⁴⁵
Open Society Foundations — whose funding of ISD, CCDH-adjacent initiatives, and media literacy programs shaped the definitional framework that platforms used to suppress inquiry into pandemic profiteering — has never been asked to account for the relationship between its censorship funding and the operational networks that censorship protected.⁴⁶
The question for all of them is the same: You funded the programs. You funded the intelligence. You funded the simulations. You funded the financial instruments. And you funded the organizations that declared public discussion of these connections to be extremism. What did you know about the operational architecture these funding streams created — and what was the censorship designed to protect?
The Architecture, Not the Man
None of the documents establish criminal liability for the living participants. What they establish is structural proximity, operational coordination, and financial integration.
This article is not about Bill Gates’s personal morality. It is not about whether he is a good or bad person. It is not about his affairs, his marriage, or his regret. I’ve been through many ad hominen attacks myself, so I know it is often a distraction, even if satisfying for those who consider their target a villain, whether true or not.
It is about a system.
The system had financial instruments designed to generate private returns under charitable cover. It had intelligence channels routing confidential security data through a convicted sex offender’s Gmail. It had a private office structure that bridged a regulated philanthropy and an unregulated intermediary. It had personnel movements that put people with “pandemic simulation” credentials into vaccine teams, reinsurance units, and defense research programs. It had a protection apparatus — funded by the same philanthropic sources — that declared inquiry into these connections to be dangerous extremism.
Epstein was the masternode. He routed the access, brokered the relationships, and held the leverage that kept the architecture together. But masternodes serve networks. And the network — the living participants, the active institutions, the ongoing funding streams, the still-operational censorship infrastructure — is what demands accountability.
The documents are in the federal record. They have file numbers. They say what they say. The searchable archive is at jmail.world.
The question is no longer what the architecture looked like. The documents have answered that. The question is who is going to be held accountable for building it — and for building the wall around it that kept the public from seeing it until now.
Note on sources and method: This article synthesizes documentary evidence analyzed across eight prior investigations in this series. All EFTA reference numbers correspond to documents in the public DOJ release under the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Where this article draws analytical conclusions — such as describing the network as an “operational architecture” or characterizing funding flows as a “protection apparatus” — those conclusions are identified as the author’s analysis. This article does not allege criminal conduct by any living person beyond what has been formally charged. All individuals and institutions referenced are presumed innocent of any wrongdoing unless and until proven otherwise in a court of law.
Notes
Khadeeja Safdar and Emily Glazer, “Bill Gates Apologizes to Foundation Staff, Admits to Affairs over Epstein Ties,” Wall Street Journal, February 25, 2026.
Draft email/letter from Epstein referencing Gates affairs and medication, released in EFTA January 30, 2026 batch; Gates spokesperson initially called claims “absolutely absurd and completely false.”
Author’s analytical framework synthesizing Parts 1–8 of this series.
Alan Dershowitz and Gerald Lefcourt, letter to the U.S. Attorney's Office, Southern District of Florida, July 2007 (23-page plea negotiation letter), first reported in "Billionaire Sex Offender Epstein Once Claimed He Co-Founded Clinton Foundation," Fox News, July 6, 2016; republished Daily Caller, July 8, 2019. Maxwell's DOJ interview quoted in Jo Becker and Michael Rothfeld, "Epstein Files Reveal Scope of Ghislaine Maxwell's Role in Clinton Circle," New York Times / GV Wire, February 9, 2026; Maxwell's actual statement was that Epstein "supported me to help them, but then I think he may have tried to use that to insert himself in some way." See also Wikipedia, "Relationship of Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein"a.
Arabella Advisors network took in $3.7 billion in 2020. Hayden Ludwig, “’Dark Money’ Networks on the Left Pulled In $3.7 Billion in 2020,” Capital Research Center, 2022; Scott Walter, Arabella: The Dark Money Network of Leftist Billionaires Secretly Transforming America (Encounter Books, 2024).
Author’s analysis of censorship infrastructure documented in Part 8 of this series (”The Real Pandemic Profiteers”).
Safdar and Glazer, “Bill Gates Apologizes.”
Ibid.
Draft Epstein email/letter, EFTA January 30, 2026 release.
Gates Foundation spokesperson statement to New York Times, February 2026.
Jeffrey Epstein to Jes Staley and Mary Erdoes, August 28, 2011, EFTA01835356; EFTA01256269.
Project Molecule — Client Draft, Version 13, August 31, 2011, SDNY_GM_00078533; EFTA_00189000.
GHIF briefing, September 2013, EFTA01103797.
Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, Lancet 389, no. 10066 (January 2017).
IPI Mission Report, June 9, 2013, EFTA00962574; Nasra Hassan field reports, EFTA01918556; EFTA00975983.
Jeffrey Epstein to Boris Nikolic, polio update re: CIA drone strike, May 30, 2013, EFTA00961839.
Nasra Hassan to Terje Rød-Larsen, “Urgent, Confi, plz pass on to Bill Gates,” February 18, 2015, EFTA00864113.
Jeffrey Epstein to Terje Rød-Larsen, October 9, 2013, EFTA00972411.
Boris Nikolic to Jeffrey Epstein, “Polio — update — specific asks,” March 9, 2013, EFTA01900866.
“bgc3 Deliverables and Scope,” March 2017, forwarded to Epstein.
Jeffrey Epstein to Larry Cohen (bgc3), January 25, 2018, EFTA02534783.
Epstein attorneys’ statement during 2007 plea negotiations, cited in Wikipedia, “Clinton Foundation.”
Maxwell wiring instructions for $1 million to Publicis for “the Clinton project,” emails released in EFTA; New York Times, February 8, 2026.
Clinton Foundation statement confirming $25,000 donation from Epstein-affiliated foundation in 2006.
White House visitor logs, 1993–1995; Epstein donations documented in FEC filings and Wikipedia, “Relationship of Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein.”
Flight logs released through Giuffre v. Maxwell civil case and EFTA releases.
Epstein 2016 deposition, released in EFTA January 30, 2026 batch.
FBI memo documenting cooperating witness and McCabe directive, released 2025; Just The News (Solomon), Aug. 14, 2025; Grassley Senate Judiciary press release, Dec. 15, 2025
Institute for Strategic Dialogue, “The Far Right’s Exploitation of Covid-19 Disinformation” (London: ISD, May 2020).
ISD founding board and funding documented in Part 8 of this series.
Facebook VP Monika Bickert, internal analysis response to White House, August 2021.
Daily Caller News Foundation, “A Dem-Linked Dark Money Network Is Quietly Funding the ‘Misinformation’ Research Industry,” 2022; Arabella Advisors $3.7 billion figure from Capital Research Center analysis of IRS filings.
New York Times, August 2025, reporting on Gates Foundation internal memo severing Arabella relationship.
Arabella Advisors restructuring into Sunflower Services announced November 18, 2025.
Tides Foundation donors documented in Capital Research Center analysis; Tides receives from Open Society Foundations, Democracy Fund, Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and Hewlett Foundation.
Open Society Foundations grants to ISD and media literacy initiatives documented in OSF annual reports and grantee databases.
House Judiciary Committee, “The Weaponization of the Federal Government,” interim reports, 2023–2024.
Stanford Internet Observatory / Election Integrity Partnership / Virality Project structure documented in congressional testimony and The Twitter Files reporting.
Virality Project recommendation on “stories of true vaccine side effects” documented in The Twitter Files, released December 2022–2023.
NCA intelligence disseminations, January–September 2020, documented in Part 5 of this series.
FinCEN deconfliction of 45 names, 2023, documented in Part 5.
DARPA pandemic preparedness intersection documented in Part 8 of this series.
Rep. Nancy Mace, House Oversight Committee statement; Melinda French Gates interview, February 2026.
FBI investigation shutdown documented in FBI memo; Epstein 2016 deposition.
Arabella-funded “misinformation” research grants documented in Daily Caller News Foundation review; Gates Foundation as Arabella funder documented in New York Times.
Open Society Foundations funding of ISD and content moderation initiatives documented in OSF grantee databases and annual reports.
Read the complete Epstein Files Investigation Series:
Part 3 — The Switchboard: From Epstein to Mandelson to McSweeney to Ahmed
Part 4 — Obama, Gates, and Epstein: The Week Emergency Rule Became Global Policy
Part 5 — “None of Us Knew”: The Classified Epstein Intelligence Trail
Part 6 — “Plz Pass On to Bill Gates”: How Confidential Polio Intelligence Reached Jeffrey Epstein
Part 7 — Epstein’s $25 Million Email
Part 9 — What Bill Gates knew
The best research to Epstein Files and the corporate medical complex is from you my friend! Thank you for your ongoing HARD WORK!
God Bless you!
Incredible writing. The world is ruled by people we didn’t put in charge. This web of structure is complex and criminal. How do we recover from this? Evil, greedy psychopaths who want us dead are ruling us.