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.