Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg said on Thursday that the public will be less concerned about the federal probe into Russia’s election interference if high-profile indictments do not happen.
“It feels like it’s gone on for so long. It feels like nothing’s happened. People are relatively unaware of the indictments, and so people feel like, ‘well, maybe there’s there because it’s gone on for so long and nothing has come of it,’ ” Greenberg said, referring to the indictments that have already come from the investigation.
“I think things will be really different if someone like a Donald Trump Jr. or Jared Kushner are indicted,” she added.
“In focus groups, that’s what people say is, ‘I’ll worry about this when I actually see some indictment that suggests that something happened with the Trump campaign and the Trump administration, but until the investigation is done, I’m not going to get myself all exercised about it,’ ” she said.
“The question is do those indictments happen? And if they don’t, I do think the issue ends up kind of just fading away,” she said.
A Gallup poll conducted last month showed that Russia did not make it into what Americans said were the top eight problems facing the U.S.
Special counsel Robert Mueller has indicted Trump aides, including former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his deputy Richard Gates, former Trump campaign foreign policy aide George Papadapoulos and Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, along with a number of Russian actors tied to hacking and interference in the 2016 election.
The charges against Manafort are related to work he did prior joining the Trump campaign.
Speculation has swirled around Trump Jr. in recent days after the president confirmed last week that a 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between Trump Jr. and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya was aimed at getting dirt on then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, contradicting what Trump Jr. had previously said about the reason for the meeting.
— Julia Manchester
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