Happy Birthday, Trump! Your Gift: The Epstein Files, All Nicely Bound!
- 4 days ago
- 4 min read
By Jessie Seigel / Washington, D.C.
Originally appeared in My Washington Whispers on June 13, 2026
The Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading room came to the nation’s capital just in time for Trump’s 80th birthday. Brought to us by the non-profit Institute for Primary Facts, the “reading room,” actually an exhibition, was in Washington, DC for five days—Tuesday, June 9 through Trump’s birthdate, June 14).
With luck, this traveling exhibition will help keep the Epstein files in the public eye despite the president’s antic attempts at distraction—like his cage fight on the White House lawn—Trump’s birthday present to himself, paid for by you and me, the taxpayers.
The Institute’s exhibit is free and open to the public, though one must reserve a spot for a specific time and bring ID, etc.
I made my visit on Friday, and this is what I saw:
The Main Floor
Immediately after entry, a wall to the right sets out the timeline of the Trump-Epstein history, beginning with Ivana Trump’s rape allegation in 1989 and ending with Trump’s 2024 conviction on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to hide hush money payments made before the 2016 presidential election.
Bookcases lining the walls on the first floor contain 3437 bound volumes of Epstein files, 800 pages in each volume. There are 2.5 million more pages that the Department of Justice has not released.
According to Straight Arrow News, David Garrett, a founder of the Institute, has said its goal is to open “immersive, traveling museum exhibits designed to provide accessible, fact-based explorations of the foundational elements of American democracy.” Garrett told Straight Arrow, that it’s hard “to have context, and it’s hard to understand the source, and you don’t know if it’s fake or it’s real, and it’s just sort of this blob of information that numbs you, right? This is the opposite of that.”
That said, only victims, their lawyers, law enforcement, members of Congress, and credentialed reporters are permitted to open and read the volumes. The general public is not permitted to do so because, Garrett told Straight Arrow, “We found the names of some survivors that have publicly asked to be redacted, and some Jane Does that are still not public.” He added, “The docs were riddled with them.”
That might prompt one to ask: what’s the point of a so-called reading room publicizing the files if the public cannot read them? However, the public does have access to the files on-line. The value of the exhibit is that physically seeing the entirety of the volumes makes the enormity of what they hold real in a way that can’t be shrugged aside in the way that browsing on social media might.
The Mezzanine
For me, the most powerful part of the exhibit was on the mezzanine between the first and second floors. There, the Institute has hung several paintings by the visual artist Maria Farmer.
In 1996, Ms. Farmer filed the first criminal complaint of sexual assault against Epstein with the FBI, for sexual abuse of her 16-year-old sister. It appears that the FBI did nothing with that information. Some years later, while doing an article on Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, Vanity Fair interviewed Farmer and her sister but conveniently left their story out of the magazine's published article. Thus, the Farmers found themselves failed by both the government and the media.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, Maria Farmer’s paintings express it all. Below are a few samples. (Note: There is a bit of unavoidable shadow on them, a victim of the available lighting and use of a cell phone. Mea Culpa.)
Maria Farmer has also done a series of pastel chalk portraits of the publicly known victims.
The second floor
On the second floor of the reading room, the Institute simply set out 1400 candles to signify 1400 victims--including 1200 known plus additional candles to signify those not yet identified.
The Institute also included a high wall on which visitors could leave notes expressing their feelings and reactions.
Some samples from the wall:
In addition to leaving notes, visitors were given an opportunity to write a birthday message on Institute-supplied post cards, which the Institute stated it planned to deliver to the White House. Regardless of whether Trump reads them, perhaps the number and sentiments expressed in them—if covered by the press—can counter Trump’s efforts to distract from the Epstein scandal with his many versions of bread and circuses.
The Trump-Epstein memorial reading room previously was installed at a gallery in lower Manhattan. After its time here in DC, Garrett hopes to take it on to five or six more states this year.
For security reasons, the Institute does not announce in advance what venue they will travel to next. But keep an eye out. Your state and city might be next.
Jessie Seigel’s journalistic career began with the political Washington Whispers column, written for The Insider. Since The Insider ended its run in 2023, Seigel has continued the column as My Washington Whispers,
www.mywashingtonwhispers.com. In addition, Seigel has had a long career as a government attorney, has received two Artist’s Fellowships from the Washington, D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities for her fiction, has been a finalist for several literary awards, and has had professional staged readings of her plays, Tinker's Damn, and The Three Jessies. More on Seigel can be found at www.jessieseigel.com.
Very interesting article. shout it from the rooftops.