About a third of Americans say the US government was wrong to indict Donald Trump over the classified documents he took from the White House and about three quarters of likely Republican primary voters view the charges as politically motivated, according to polls published Sunday.
Asked whether the charges unsealed Friday influenced their view of the former president, 61% in a CBS News/YouGov poll said it wouldn’t. That poll of likely GOP primary voters also found that 76% concerned that the charges are politically motivated.
While 48% of respondents in an ABC News/Ipsos poll said the Justice Department was right to charge Trump, 35% said he shouldn’t have been.
The surveys suggest that Trump, the front-runner for the GOP’s 2024 presidential nomination, is weathering the immediate fallout from the indictment among his core voters at least for now. The former president dismissed the charges at a Republican state convention in North Carolina on Saturday, telling the audience he was “indicted over nothing.”
Still, the ABC poll found that more respondents view the federal charges against Trump over the documents he took to his Mar-a-Lago residence as serious than those filed against him in New York over hush money allegedly paid to a porn star.
While 21% of Republicans in the poll said in April that the New York charges were serious, 38% said that last week’s federal indictment was.
With charges against Trump including obstruction of justice and violating the Espionage Act by retaining national defense information, his critics and supporters went on US network shows Sunday to give a sense of the political battle ahead.
William Barr, who served as US attorney general during the Trump administration, called the indictment “very, very damning” and said “this idea of presenting Trump as a victim here — a victim of a witch hunt — is ridiculous.”
“If even half of it is true, then he’s toast,” Barr said on “Fox News Sunday.”
Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, took up Trump’s argument that he’s being “prosecuted” by President Joe Biden. While “not justifying his behavior,” Graham told ABC’s “This Week” the indictment is “not going to change my support for Donald Trump.”
Representative Nancy Mace, a Republican who has sought out moderate stands on some issues, said the charges against Trump are “weaponizing the executive branch to take out your political enemies.”
Biden said last week he hadn’t discussed the case with Attorney General Merrick Garland. “I have not spoken to him at all,” Biden told reporters on Friday. “I’m not going to speak to him. And I have no comment on what happened.”
“I think there’s no evidence that the federal Department of Justice has been weaponized,” Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat from Delaware and Biden ally, said Sunday on “This Week.”
ABC News/Ipsos polled 910 adults on Friday and Saturday with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.7 percentage points. The June 7-10 CBS News/YouGov poll of likely Republican primary voters has a margin of error of plus or minus 5.5 points.
--With assistance from Gregory Korte.
(Updates with comments from US news shows starting in eighth paragraph.)
