Analysis | Judge says Trump likely broke the law; most Americans aren't there yet - The Washington Post

Last week, a federal judge reached an extraordinary conclusion: Former president Donald Trump had “more likely than not” committed a crime in trying to overturn the 2020 election.

But the American people have yet to be convinced. In fact, the level of collective belief that Trump committed a crime between Election Day and Jan. 6 remains noticeably stable, when placed next to past instances in which Trump has been accused of crimes.

The Quinnipiac University poll, released Wednesday, showed 46 percent of Americans believe Trump committed a crime, compared to 48 percent who say he did not. (We’ll be bolding the relevant numbers throughout.) The partisan splits are about what you’d expect, with 9 in 10 Republicans convinced Trump is innocent, and nearly 9 in 10 Democrats saying he’s guilty. Independents are split down the middle.

These numbers echo past surveys of public reactions during other legal controversies from Trump’s candidacy and presidency. They include the hush money paid to Stormy Daniels, Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and the Ukraine scandal that led to Trump’s first impeachment.

Amid the Russia investigation in late 2017 — after criminal charges were brought against three Trump campaign advisers — 49 percent said it was likely he had committed a crime, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll. (Only 19 percent believed there was solid evidence of it at the time, though.)

By early 2019, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen testified that Trump authorized and reimbursed him to pay undisclosed hush money to two women who accused Trump of affairs during the 2016 campaign — a scheme for which Cohen pleaded guilty. A Quinnipiac poll from that period found 45 percent of people believed Trump had committed unspecified crimes while in office — though 64 percent of all people believed he’d committed them before becoming president. (The scheme was hatched during the campaign, but it included payments to Cohen once Trump was in office.)

Polls conducted in March and April of 2019 suggested views on this were indeed nuanced. A March 2019 Marist College poll showed 24 percent thought Trump broke the law vis-a-vis Russia, but 33 percent said he had merely done something unethical. The following month, an AP-NORC poll showed the percentage believing Trump had done something illegal had increased to 35 percent, but still about as many people labeled his actions as either unethical or faultless.

Amid the Ukraine scandal in early 2020, those the numbers rose again in an AP-NORC poll — to 42 percent saying Trump did something illegal in pressuring Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky and 32 percent citing something unethical.

A Pew Research Center poll at the time showed 63 percent thought Trump had probably done something illegal as president (including one-third of Republicans), but just 38 percent said he definitely did.

About the only time belief in Trump’s criminality crested to a majority came very shortly after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection. A Post-ABC poll showed 54 percent said Trump should be criminally charged for inciting the riot. Quinnipiac pegged the number at 51 percent.

By the following month, though, things reverted to the mean. Another Quinnipiac poll gave people a third option — that Trump incited the riot, but shouldn’t face charges — and 6 percent endorsed that. Support for charges dropped to 45 percent.

That perhaps shouldn’t be surprising. Trump weathered multiple scandals during his time in office, and his potential criminality featured in many of them, to varying degrees.

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III couldn’t determine a criminal conspiracy between Trump and Russia and decided it wasn’t his place to accuse Trump of obstruction of justice (given Justice Department policy against criminally charging a sitting president). But he strongly suggested Trump’s actions — in as many as five instances — might have met the required thresholds for obstruction. A later bipartisan Senate report also found additional, hard evidence of coordination between Trump’s campaign chairman and a “Russian intelligence officer,” though it acknowledged that much remained deliberately obscured.

In Cohen’s case, the hush money was established as a crime, and he implicated Trump in its planning and execution, including by providing copies of the reimbursements.

On Ukraine, a congressional watchdog determined that the Trump White House’s holding up aid to the country was, in fact, illegal — though it didn’t address Trump’s role specifically. The aid was held up in the service of leveraging Zelensky for a politically-helpful investigation of Hunter Biden, though the gambit failed and the aid was released.

Even next to all of these, there’s arguably more there there when it comes to the Jan. 6 investigation. Not only has a judge determined Trump likely broke the law, but we also found out Thursday that the Justice Department will investigate Trump’s removal of 15 boxes of records from the White House — including some labeled “top secret.” The Jan. 6 committee has also said that Trump potentially broke a law against obstructing Congress’s certification of the election — a charge that most (though not all) judges have said can be used against Jan. 6 defendants.

But yet again, there is no real clamoring among a majority of Americans for charging Trump. Part of that is undoubtedly due to partisanship, but a significant number of people who dislike Trump — his unfavorable rating generally hovered in the mid-50s as president — never quite reached the point of believing he broke the law.

Public opinion shouldn’t matter when it comes to whether Trump ultimately will be charged with a crime, be it by the Justice Department or by local authorities in Fulton County, Ga. And part of it could simply be fatigue. But it does tell you something about how compelling the middle finds the evidence so far — and about how such charges would be greeted.

source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/04/07/trump-crime-poll-americans/

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