The Trump administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case is landing with a thud among the public, with a new poll finding widespread suspicion that officials are sitting on evidence they were supposed to release.
According to a CNN poll conducted by SSRS, few Americans are satisfied with how much information the federal government has made public about Epstein, the convicted sex offender whose case has loomed over multiple administrations and taken on a particularly sharp edge during Trump 2.0.
The poll’s most damning finding was that just 6 percent of Americans are satisfied with how much the administration has released from the Epstein files so far. Forty-nine percent say they’re dissatisfied, with the remainder unfazed by the case.
The findings will likely rankle President Donald Trump, who has grown increasingly frustrated with the focus on the saga, especially with the midterm elections looming. “Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy’s been talked about for years,” Trump snapped at a reporter in July. “Are people still talking about this guy, this creep? That is unbelievable. Do you want to waste the time?”
A two-thirds majority, meanwhile, say the government is intentionally withholding information that should be released, while just 16 percent believe officials are making an effort to disclose everything possible. The remainder say they have not heard enough about the case to say.
The poll was conducted less than a month after a Dec. 19 deadline set by Congress for the Justice Department to release all of its Epstein-related files. Earlier in January, the department estimated it had released less than 1 percent of those materials.
Department officials told a court that they had enlisted approximately 80 additional attorneys from the criminal division to assist prosecutors in New York’s Southern District with reviewing the documents.
Skepticism spans party lines, though it is most pronounced among Democrats. Nearly nine in 10 Democrats say the government is intentionally holding back information, as do 72 percent of independents and 42 percent of Republicans. Only about one-third of Republicans say the government is making an effort to release information, with the rest declining to weigh in either way.
Public dissatisfaction with the pace and scope of disclosure is stark, with partisan differences sharp on the level of appeasement. Only 12 percent of Republicans say they are satisfied with the information released, compared with 3 percent of Democrats and 3 percent of independents.
Those gaps come as partisan attitudes have shifted under Trump, who first urged Republicans not to vote for the bill establishing the December deadline and dismissed the Epstein files as a Democratic “hoax,” before changing course.
Trump’s own MAGA base, expecting his administration to release all the files on the disgraced financier when the president returned to office, had been infuriated over the summer when Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that nothing further would be released.
Now, according to the poll, Republicans have grown more inclined to downplay the relevance of how much information has been released. A 67 percent majority now say it does not matter or that they have not heard enough to say, up from 56 percent last summer. Over the same period, the share of Republicans who say they are dissatisfied has dropped to 21 percent, down from 40 percent.
Democrats have moved in the opposite direction. Seventy-one percent now describe themselves as dissatisfied, up from 56 percent in July, while the share who offer no opinion has fallen to 27 percent from 41 percent. Views among independents have barely shifted, with 54 percent saying they are dissatisfied and 43 percent declining to offer an opinion.
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