Poll shows Americans doubt Trump administration on Epstein justice
Americans are not buying the Trump administration’s Epstein accountability pitch, and only about 10% said it has helped hold anyone to account.
The deeper story in the Epstein files is not the volume of documents. It is the collapse of trust behind them. Americans appear to believe that, even with Congress, the Justice Department and President Donald Trump all pressing into the case, real accountability for Jeffrey Epstein and his network still feels out of reach.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted June 3-8 found that only about 10% of respondents overall said the Trump administration had helped efforts to hold people connected to Epstein accountable. The skepticism crossed party lines, including inside Trump’s own coalition: just 21% of Republicans said they thought the administration had helped deliver justice in Epstein-related cases. The survey included 4,531 U.S. adults and pointed to a broader credibility problem that goes beyond one scandal.
That mistrust has only deepened as the government has tried to show it is acting. Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act in November 2025, and Trump signed it into law on November 19, 2025. The law requires the Justice Department to release records related to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, including flight logs, travel records and material naming or referencing people connected to the investigation, while allowing officials to withhold victims’ personal information and material that could compromise active probes.
On January 30, the Justice Department said it released more than 3 million additional pages of Epstein-related records, along with more than 2,000 videos and 180,000 images, bringing the total production to nearly 3.5 million pages under the transparency law. Instead of calming doubts, the release seemed to reinforce the sense that the most important questions remain unresolved.
Epstein’s history still hangs over the politics. He pleaded guilty in 2008 to prostitution-related charges that included soliciting an underage girl. He died by suicide in a Manhattan jail cell in 2019, but the case has kept resurfacing because of lingering questions about how law enforcement handled it and whether influential people were protected along the way.
Those questions have become a live Washington fight as the House Oversight Committee prepared to question Bill Gates about his ties to Epstein. A separate Reuters/Ipsos poll in February found a majority of Americans said the Epstein files had lowered their trust in U.S. political and business leaders and confirmed a broader belief that powerful people are rarely held accountable. The June survey suggested that Trump’s administration has not shaken that judgment.
This article was produced by Prism’s automated news system from verified source data, official records, and press releases, then run through automated quality and moderation checks before publishing. The system is built and supervised by the people who set the standards it runs under. Read our full AI policy.
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