Political reporter Eli Yokley said in an interview Friday that voters’ views about President Trump remain entrenched despite the findings of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report.
“What we’ve also seen is that views on Trump are pretty solid on this,” Yokley, a reporter at Morning Consult, told Hill.TV’s “What America’s Thinking.”
“Things don’t move that much. People still believe that Russia has compromising information. People still believe that he did something wrong,” he added.
Yokley weighed in amid fresh debate over Attorney General William Barr’s handling of the special counsel report after it was revealed this week that Mueller had written him expressing concerns about his characterization of the probe’s findings.
Barr wrote in a four-page letter to Congress in March that Mueller did not find evidence of coordination or conspiracy between Trump’s campaign and Russia. But the since-released 448-page Mueller report provided detail about Trump associates’ contacts with Russian figures and receptiveness to certain actions, even if it could not establish coordination between members of the campaign and Moscow.
Barr has also faced scrutiny over the rollout of the Mueller report, with Democrats slamming him for holding a press conference hours before releasing the documentation. Democrats called the press conference a public relations move designed to protect Trump.
A new Hill-HarrisX survey released on Friday found that 76 percent of Republican respondents said Barr accurately described Mueller’s findings in the report, while only 31 percent of Democrats said the attorney general’s description was accurate.
Overall, views of the accuracy of Barr’s summary were split, with 53 percent of registered voters polled saying Barr provided a largely accurate summary of Mueller’s legal findings and 47 percent calling his summary largely inaccurate.
Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee grilled Barr this week about the recent revelation that Mueller said Barr’s four-page summary of the special counsel’s report did not “fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of the investigation’s conclusions.
Barr refused to appear before the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday to testify on the matter, prompting backlash from Democrats.
— Julia Manchester
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