In a striking act of radical transparency, a nonprofit called the Institute of Primary Facts has converted roughly 3.5 million pages of Department of Justice documents into a physical library—complete with 3,437 bound volumes—and opened its doors in Tribeca this month. The pop-up exhibition, called“The Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room,”makes the full Epstein Files Transparency Act releases available to the public in a format that’s unmissable: ink on paper, spine to spine, impossible to ignore.
The premise is audacious and deliberate. According to the Institute,“The truth is hard to deny when it’s printed and bound for you to see.”It’s a statement about accountability and visibility—a pushback against digital releases that are easier to bury or dismiss. All those pages, all those documents, demand your attention in ways a PDF never can.
That said, access comes with guardrails. The Department of Justice made errors while redacting victim names, so the general public can’t flip through the entire collection. Journalists and lawyers can register for access, but the exhibit itself acknowledges the messiness of the release process and the ongoing tensions around what gets exposed and what stays hidden.
The exhibition also features displays examining the long friendship between President Donald Trump and Epstein, who died in federal custody in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges involving minors. Trump and Epstein were close for decades before they reportedly fell out in 2004 over a property deal, after which Trump publicly distanced himself from his former ally. Trump has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, despite appearing repeatedly in what’s been dubbed the“Epstein Files.”
David Garrett, one of the creators behind the project, frames this as a pro-democracy initiative.“We’re a pro-democracy organization, with the goal of educating the public using these kinds of sort of pop-up museums and other in-real-life experiences to help people understand the corruption in the United States, the dangers to democracy,”he told AFP. Garrett also emphasized that the Trump administration’s handling of the document release deserves scrutiny—many have accused justice officials of downplaying or obscuring Trump’s ties to Epstein—and that creating“real public outcry”and“real accountability”was the exhibit’s core mission.
The exhibit is open to the public until May 21, offering a window (however limited) into documents that have shaped national conversation about power, privilege, and who gets held to account.
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Andrew Johnson
Andrew Johnson is a contributor to LocalBeat, covering local news and community stories.
