An overwhelming majority of voters said transparency in the Jeffrey Epstein case is important to their views on President Trump, according to a new poll.
A Harvard CAPS/Harris poll released Monday found 65 percent of respondents said transparency around the case of the disgraced financier is important to their opinion of Trump, while 22 percent said it is not important.
A separate 13 percent said they did not know or were unsure.
The poll also found that about 2 in 5 respondents were unsatisfied with Trump’s handling of the case’s investigation: 42 percent of respondents rated Trump as “poor” over his handling of the case’s investigation, while 18 percent rated him as “excellent,” a separate 16 percent said “good” and 13 percent rated Trump as “fair.”
Respondents were also surveyed about how well they thought Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel and FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino handled the investigation.
Compared to the other officials, while Trump received the highest percentage of respondents who rated his handling as “poor,” he also received the highest percentage of respondents who rated him as “excellent.”
Bongino rated among survey respondents as the second-best at handling the Epstein probe, with 14 percent rating his handling of the case as “excellent,” while 26 percent of respondents rated him as “poor.” Additionally, 26 percent said they did not know or were unsure, 19 percent rated him as “good,” and 15 percent rated him as “fair.”
“Epstein is the problem that just won’t go away and it is still festering as the data shows people are interested in it and want greater transparency on a bipartisan basis,” Mark Penn, chair of the Harris Poll, said in an email.
The Trump administration is fielding pressure to release more documents in the Epstein probe, related to the disgraced financier who pleaded guilty to Florida state charges on solicitation of prostitution and who was awaiting trial for sex trafficking and conspiracy charges when he died in jail in 2019.
Both Democrats and Republicans are pushing for more information about Epstein after the Justice Department released a memo in July saying that Epstein had no “client list” and that he had died by suicide.
Previously, Bondi had acknowledged the existence of a purported “client list.”
Trump has signaled he’s fine with allowing the Epstein files to be released, saying Friday, “I’m in support of them keeping it open. Innocent people shouldn’t be hurt, but I’m in support of keeping it totally open.”
“You’ve got a lot of people that could be mentioned in those files that don’t deserve to be, you know, people, because he knew everybody in Palm Beach,” Trump said.
The Harvard CAPS/Harris poll was conducted Aug. 20-21 and surveyed 2,025 registered voters. It is a collaboration of the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University and the Harris Poll.
The survey is an online sample drawn from the Harris Panel and weighted to reflect known demographics. The margin of error is 2.2 percentage points.
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