Majority say they support decision to drop case against Flynn: poll

A narrow majority of voters say they support the Justice Department’s decision to drop the case against President Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, according to a new Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll survey released exclusively to The Hill.

Fifty-one percent of voters polled said they supported the move, while 49 percent said they opposed it.

The Justice Department moved earlier this month to drop its case against Flynn over charges of lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russia before Trump took office, saying in a court filing that it did not believe it could make a case against Flynn anymore. 

The poll comes less than a week after a National Security Agency document made public on Wednesday showed 39 former Obama administration officials, including former Vice President Joe Biden, asked to “unmask” the identity of an American who had come up in intelligence briefings based on his conversations with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

Flynn, who was already a senior member of Trump’s national security team, was revealed to be that person.

The same poll found that 53 percent of respondents said they supported the decision after being made aware of potential FBI process breaches, while another 47 percent said they still opposed the move.

Unmasking is a common practice in the government, though Trump and his allies say it is evidence that Obama administration officials were looking to undermine Trump before he took office.

“[The] public narrowly sided with the Justice Department’s actions on Gen. Flynn but increased their support when told about some of the facts surrounding the motion to dismiss the case,” Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll Director Mark Penn told The Hill.

“It has become highly partisan rather than fact-based as nearly half the voters think he was charged with colluding or coordinating with Russia,” he continued. 

The Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll survey was conducted May 13-14 by The Harris Poll among 1,854 registered voters. Results were weighted for age within gender, region, race and ethnicity, marital status, household size, income, employment, education, political party and political ideology where necessary to align them with their actual proportions in the population. Propensity score weighting was also used to adjust for respondents’ propensity to be online.