Bill Gates is set to testify before the House Oversight Committee in June as part of its investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. Former Attorney General Pam Bondi, by contrast, will not testify for now — the DOJ declined. Melania Trump, meanwhile, issued a public statement from the White House insisting she was not friends with Epstein and calling on Congress to take further action.

The spectacle of congressional Epstein hearings is by now a familiar one: high-profile names, carefully managed testimony, and outcomes that rarely match the gravity of the underlying subject. Gates’s appearance will be watched closely given the documented history of meetings between the two men that Gates has previously described as a mistake. Whether a congressional hearing is the mechanism for learning anything genuinely new about Epstein’s networks is a separate question from whether it will happen. It will happen.

Calls are growing inside Congress for a formal investigation of Polymarket after another instance of anonymous traders making well-timed, well-sized bets on a major geopolitical event hours before it became public. The pattern is becoming hard to ignore: someone, somewhere, keeps knowing things before markets — or media — do.

Prediction markets have always carried this tension. Their theoretical value is as an information aggregation mechanism, surfacing the collective probability estimates of informed participants. The problem is that some participants are more informed than others, and not always because they’re better analysts. When bets arrive in size, in the right direction, in the hours before an event breaks, the question of whether markets are discovering truth or laundering inside information becomes unavoidable. Congress investigating Polymarket is probably not the most efficient path to an answer. But it may be the one that actually happens.

Republican Clay Fuller won Georgia’s 14th Congressional District special election, replacing Marjorie Taylor Greene, who resigned after breaking with Trump over Gaza, healthcare costs, and the Epstein files. Fuller, a lieutenant colonel in the Georgia Air National Guard and former White House fellow, beat Democrat Shawn Harris to preserve the Republican House majority.

The headline is a Republican hold. The story is the margin.

Fuller won by fewer than 12 percentage points in a district Trump carried by 37 points in 2024. That’s a 25-point swing in a safe Republican seat. In a midterm environment where enthusiasm gaps and presidential approval typically dominate, that number is a flashing warning for Republicans heading into November.

Republican Clay Fuller won the special election in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, replacing Marjorie Taylor Greene, who resigned after breaking with Trump over Gaza, healthcare costs, and the Epstein files.

Fuller is a lieutenant colonel in the Georgia Air National Guard and a former White House fellow during Trump’s first term. He beat Democrat Shawn Harris.

The margin: under 12 points. In a district Trump carried by 37 points in 2024.

Bill Gates is scheduled to appear before the House Oversight Committee in June to answer questions related to the Jeffrey Epstein investigation. The appearance follows the committee’s ongoing examination of Epstein’s network and the figures connected to it.

Gates has previously acknowledged meeting with Epstein multiple times after Epstein’s 2008 conviction, describing the relationship as a mistake in hindsight. The extent of those meetings, their purpose, and what Gates knew about Epstein’s activities are among the questions Congress is expected to pursue.

The US debt ceiling is a recurring mechanism by which Congress periodically threatens to blow up the global financial system and then, at the last possible moment, decides not to. The cycle is predictable. The risk each iteration is real.

Here is how it works. Congress authorizes spending through the budget process. Separately, it sets a legal limit on how much the Treasury can borrow to cover obligations it has already committed to. When spending exceeds revenue — which it does, consistently — the Treasury borrows. When borrowing approaches the ceiling, the Treasury uses “extraordinary measures” to extend the timeline. When those measures are exhausted, the US technically cannot pay its bills.