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, according to two people affiliated with the Gates Foundation who are familiar with the arrangement.
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. The people who disclosed his involvement insisted on anonymity to discuss Mr. Greenberg’s previously undisclosed function.
The arrangement, while not uncommon, raised eyebrows among government ethics experts who said it could create questionable optics for the deposition in a high-profile investigation.
A spokeswoman for Gates Ventures did not respond to multiple requests for comment about Mr. Greenberg’s role advising Mr. Gates. Mr. Greenberg also did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Mr. Gates’s close relationship with Mr. Epstein has roiled his foundation, which has authorized an outside review of its ties to Mr. Epstein. Mr. Gates apologized to foundation staff members in an all-hands meeting this year for his associations with Mr. Epstein.
House Democrats say they want to grill Mr. Gates behind closed doors on Wednesday about the nature of his relationship with Mr. Epstein.
“We need accountability for those in power and answers for survivors,” said Representative Yassamin Ansari, Democrat of Arizona. “No one — regardless of power, political party or wealth — is above justice.”
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.
A spokeswoman said the committee was not filming voluntary transcribed interviews for witnesses who agreed to come in quickly. The committee released filmed interviews with other witnesses whom it had subpoenaed, including Bill and Hillary Clinton and Les Wexner.
Government watchdog experts said it was not unusual for a former top committee official to be hired by a person under scrutiny by the panel, and that it would not necessarily violate ethics rules — as long as Mr. Greenberg was not dealing directly with the committee he had previously worked for.
Former members of Congress and top aides have a one-year “cooling off” period after leaving those jobs, during which they are barred from lobbying or communicating directly with lawmakers or committees. Mr. Greenberg would not be allowed, for instance, to negotiate with the oversight panel about the terms of Mr. Gates’s appearance. But there is no rule prohibiting him from privately sharing with a client what he knows about how the committee operates, or his knowledge of how it is approaching a particular investigation.
Still, the ethics experts said it could give the appearance of an unseemly revolving door.
Donald Sherman, the chief counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonpartisan government watchdog group, said Mr. Greenberg’s role could potentially raise questions, including whether he had been a part of any discussions when he was still working for the committee about potentially inviting Mr. Gates to testify.
“Certainly someone with Bill Gates’s money can afford to hire the people who he believes are going to set him up for navigating the congressional oversight process — and it is a unique process,” Mr. Sherman said.
But he added: “Optics matters a great deal in congressional investigation. Certainly it raises questions that the public and the minority might ask about whether the investigation is independent or arms length, separate and apart from whether he is technically complying with the rules.”
Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, the interim vice president of policy and government affairs at the Project on Government Oversight, also said the arrangement raised concerns.
“Hearings are supposed to be serious attempts at fact-finding,” he said. “You would want a process that is free of any sort of conflicts of interest or influence peddling. There’s a lot of using the position you used to have, the leverage and the juice you bring, using that to benefit whoever you’re working for and tilt the playing field.”
Until December, Mr. Greenberg served as general counsel and chief investigations counsel for the House Oversight Committee. In that role, he led the investigation into former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s mental acuity, taking the lead in the transcribed depositions of top Biden administration officials like Annie Tomasini and Karine Jean-Pierre, the former White House press secretary.
Mr. Greenberg was working on the committee last year when it deposed William P. Barr, the former attorney general, in the Epstein investigation.
After leaving Capitol Hill, Mr. Greenberg joined the law firm DLA Piper. The firm now highlights his expertise in congressional oversight with glowing accolades from Mr. Comer on its website.
“Jake Greenberg proved to be one of Washington’s most capable oversight investigators,” Mr. Comer says in a testimonial prominently displayed.
DLA Piper did not respond to a request for comment. A spokeswoman for the committee, Jessica Collins, said the committee had not worked with Mr. Greenberg in any capacity since he left and that the panel has worked only with Mr. Moran regarding Mr. Gates’s appearance.
Mr. Greenberg is not expected to be with Mr. Gates at the deposition on Wednesday, according to a person familiar with the proceedings who insisted on anonymity to discuss them in advance.
In his previous role, Mr. Greenberg was often one of the most direct and aggressive questioners of witnesses whom the Republican majority called in to testify in their investigations — experience that could help him prepare Mr. Gates for the kinds of questions he might face on Wednesday.
He asked Kevin O’Connor, who served as Mr. Biden’s physician under the president, whether he was ever “told to lie about the president’s health” or believed he was “unfit to execute his duties as president.”
When questioning Ms. Jean-Pierre, he asked whether she thought it was “reckless for President Biden to seek re-election,” whether she ever spoke with him about “why he wasn’t as good of a speaker as he used to be,” and whether she felt she “had to be blindly obedient to President Biden.”
Mr. Gates is not the only witness to turn to a former staff member for the committee ahead of his appearance before Congress. When the Clintons were fighting the subpoenas in the Epstein investigation, they brought on Ashley Callen, a co-chair of the congressional investigations practice at Jenner & Block, to deal with G.O.P. members of the Oversight Committee. Ms. Callen had previously worked as general counsel for Speaker Mike Johnson and other top Republicans. She also had worked as a deputy staff director on the House Oversight Committee under Mr. Comer.
But Ms. Callen had never worked on the Epstein issue, and her departure from Capitol Hill exceeded any cooling off period, so she was able to interact directly with the committee in her official role as a lawyer for the Clintons. She also appeared at the April deposition of Ted Waitt, the co-founder of Gateway computers who for years dated Ghislaine Maxwell and was called to testify before the committee, acting as his counsel.
Annie Karni is a congressional correspondent for The Times.
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