Rand Paul Questions Why a Private Citizen Was Given Top Secret Nuclear-Level Clearance for Seven Years

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Bill Gates has never held elected office. He has never been employed by the U.S. federal government. Yet for seven years, Gates held one of the highest levels of security clearance available in the United States.

Watch the video above for more on what Rand Paul just released.

A letter from the Department of Energy, obtained by Senator Rand Paul, confirms it directly. Gates was issued a “Q” clearance, the DOE’s highest classified designation, typically awarded to people working on nuclear weapons design or with access to restricted data. The letter states his clearance “was reciprocally granted on June 11, 2014, and subsequently terminated on December 6, 2021.” Seven years. Spanning the entire COVID-19 pandemic.

A Private Citizen With Nuclear-Level Access

Senator Paul did not stop at showing Gates received the clearance. As chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Paul released 1,375 pages of documents Friday detailing Gates’s high-level access across multiple federal agencies, not just the DOE.

According to those documents, DARPA gave the Gates Foundation a private briefing on its military biological research programs. The records also show Dr. Anthony Fauci editing a pandemic manuscript written by Gates, with Fauci writing that he gave the manuscript “in close confidence to a trusted colleague who destroyed it after reading it. His name is Dr. David Morens.”

Even some of Gates’s own allies inside the government seemed uneasy about how far his influence reached. Then-NIH Director Francis Collins privately raised concerns after Gates pledged $12 million toward a universal flu vaccine following a meeting with President Trump, a project NIH had already committed $104 million toward on its own. Collins asked plainly, “Is this coordinated in some way, or is Bill going rogue?”

Why a Nuclear Reactor Company Doesn’t Fully Explain This

There is one documented connection between Gates and nuclear policy: he co-founded and chairs TerraPower, an advanced nuclear reactor company. That’s a real link to the Department of Energy’s world.

But the DOE’s own letter never cites TerraPower as the reason for the clearance. Nobody has explained, on the record, why a private citizen needed access to Top Secret Restricted Data in the first place, let alone for seven uninterrupted years spanning the most consequential public health emergency in modern American history.

Paul summed up his objection in one sentence. “Private billionaires should not be steering national policy behind closed doors.”

Another Piece of a Larger Investigation

Gates’s Q clearance is just one part of a much bigger investigation Paul has been building for months. Fauci’s diary entries. A Senate contempt vote. State-level criminal investigations now underway in Florida, Alabama, and Louisiana. Each new document release adds another layer to the same central question: who actually shaped America’s pandemic response, and through what channels.

It wasn’t a formal government appointment. It wasn’t put up for any public vote. It was a quiet grant of extraordinary access, one that let a private citizen sit close to decisions affecting the entire country, without the accountability that normally comes attached to that kind of power.