It’s a short walk from the White House to the Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room, but it’s still a long way for the accountability survivors are seeking.
“In this room you have 17,000 pounds of evidence of one of the worst crimes in American history,” said David Garrett, organizer for the Institute for Primary Facts.
The curated exhibit is hoping to close that gap. It includes a printed copy of every single document released by the Department of Justice as part of the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
“What is 3.5 million files? You know, it’s hard to really know what that means until you print them all out,” Garrett said.
There are nearly 3,500 volumes totaling 800 pages each. Shelf after shelf is packed with information.
“There’s something about seeing it tactile, right?” Garrett said. “Any one of these books, has something horrible in it, and some of them have lots of horrible stuff.”
The gravity is the goal.
“You see a cat video and a birthday party and evidence of one of the worst crimes in history, and they all kind of seem the same, and you spend six seconds on each one, and then you move on to the next thing,” Garrett says. “When you come in here, you put the phone away, right? This, this room will stop the scroll, and you have to sit with it for a minute, and you have to sit with how much evidence there is.”
Garrett is not a curator, or a historian, or an artist, or even a political activst. He’s a dad, troubled by the pace in which some are trying to move past this issue.
“It’s the corruption. There will always be monsters.There will always be terrible people and terrible crimes. It’s the corruption that destroys democracies,” he said.
Steps from the bookcases, there’s a floor-to-ceiling timeline of Epstein, of Donald Trump, and of their friendship. While the President has not been interviewed by the DOJ or the House Oversight Committee, Garrett says he put Trump’s name on the exhibit because of his personal connection to the case.
“Donald Trump’s name is mentioned 38,000 times,” Garrett said. “There are people on his cabinet that that are mentioned in the Epstein files. It’s incredibly corrupt for him to be in charge of the investigation.”
The president has denied a real friendship with Epstein.
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