NEW YORK - The number of Americans who approve of President Donald Trump dropped by 3 percentage points to the lowest level of the year following the release of a special counsel report detailing Russian interference in the last U.S. presidential election, according to an exclusive Reuters/Ipsos public opinion poll.
The poll, conducted Thursday afternoon to Friday morning, is the first national survey to measure the response from the American public after the U.S. Justice Department released Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 448-page report that recounted numerous occasions in which Trump may have interfered with the investigation.
According to the poll, 37 percent of adults in the United States approved of Trump’s performance in office, down from 40 percent in a similar poll conducted on April 15 and matching the lowest level of the year. That is also down from 43 percent in a poll conducted shortly after U.S. Attorney General William Barr circulated a summary of the report in March.
In his report, Mueller said his investigation did not establish that the Trump campaign had coordinated with Russians. However, investigators did find “multiple acts by the President that were capable of exerting undue influence over law enforcement investigations.”
While Mueller ultimately decided not to charge Trump with a crime, he also said that the investigation did not exonerate the president, either.
The Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted online in English throughout the United States. It gathered responses from 1,005 adults, including 924 who were familiar with the Mueller report. It has a credibility interval, a measure of precision, of 4 percentage points.
To see the entire Reuters/Ipsos poll, click here.
SHARP SPLIT
The poll found that 50 percent of Americans agreed that “Trump or someone from his campaign worked with Russia to influence the 2016 election,” and 58 percent agreed that the president “tried to stop investigations into Russian influence on his administration.”
Forty percent said they thought Trump should be impeached, while 42 percent said he should not.
The poll responses were sharply split along party lines, with Democrats much more critical of Trump than his fellow Republicans.
The Mueller investigation had previously charged 34 other people and three Russian entities, netting convictions or guilty pleas from several Trump associates including former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, White House national security adviser Michael Flynn and longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen.
So far, the report does not appear to have convinced many to change their opinions about the president’s conduct during a bitter presidential campaign, whether his inner circle improperly engaged with Russian agents, or if he tried to interfere with federal investigators afterward.
Among those respondents who said they were familiar with the Mueller report, 70 percent said the report had not changed their view of Trump or Russia’s involvement in the U.S. presidential race. Only 15 percent said they had learned something that changed their view of Trump or the Russia investigation, and a majority of those respondents said they were now more likely to believe that “Trump or someone close to him broke the law.”
source: news.abs-cbn.com
WASHINGTON - Donald Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort lied to the FBI and special counsel investigators after pleading guilty to federal charges, breaching his plea agreement, according to a court filing on Monday.
Manafort said in the same filing he disagreed with Special Counsel Robert Mueller's assertion that he lied to investigators.
Both the special counsel and Manafort's attorneys agreed there was no reason to delay his sentencing and asked the court to set a date for that.
Mueller, who is probing Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and possible collusion between Moscow and the Trump campaign, said in the filing that after signing a plea agreement: "Manafort committed federal crimes by lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Special Counsel’s Office on a variety of subject matters."
Mueller said in the filing that those lies breached Manafort's plea agreement.
Manafort's attorneys said in the same filing that Manafort had met with the government on several occasions and provided information "in an effort to live up to his cooperation obligations."
They said Manafort disagreed with the characterization that he had breached the agreement.
Manafort, a longtime Republican political consultant who made tens of millions of dollars working for pro-Kremlin politicians in Ukraine, ran the Trump campaign as it took off in mid-2016.
He attended a meeting at Trump Tower in June 2016 with a group of Russians offering damaging information on Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, who lost in an upset to Trump in the presidential vote that November.
Since September this year when he took a plea deal in return for reduced charges, Manafort has been cooperating with Mueller's inquiry.
Russia denies U.S. allegations it hacked Democratic Party emails and ran a disinformation campaign, largely on social media. Trump denies any campaign collusion and calls the investigation a political witch hunt.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team has asked the FBI to look into claims that women were offered money to fabricate sexual assault allegations against Mueller, who leads the probe into Russia's attempts to influence the U.S. election in 2016.
"When we learned last week of allegations that women were offered money to make false claims about the Special Counsel, we immediately referred the matter to the FBI for investigation," Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mueller, said on Tuesday.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation declined to comment.
Jack Burkman, a lawyer and Republican operative who has in the past promoted right-wing conspiracies on social media, told Reuters he was speaking to five women who claimed they were sexually assaulted by Mueller, and denied paying them for the information.
He said he would have a news conference close to Washington on Thursday with one of the women who claimed she was sexually assaulted by Mueller in 2010, and that the other four women still needed to be vetted.
Jennifer Taub, a professor at Vermont Law School, said she received an email on October 22 from an individual offering to compensate her if she would discuss her "past encounters" with Mueller, who she says she has never met.
Taub said she found the email, a copy of which was seen by Reuters, to be "creepy" and forwarded it to Mueller's office. The email was sent to her by a person who claimed to be a researcher at Surefire Intelligence, Ltd.
Reuters was unable to connect with anyone at phone numbers listed on Surefire Intelligence's website.
Burkman declined to say if he was working with Surefire.
Mueller is leading the politically sensitive investigation into Russian meddling and possible collusion between Republican Donald Trump's 2016 campaign team and Russian officials.
Burkman has been critical of the Mueller probe and sought to raise funds for Rick Gates and Michael Flynn, two former Trump aides who pleaded guilty to charges brought against them by Mueller's team.
Trump denies any collusion and has repeatedly described Mueller's probe as a partisan "witch hunt."
Russia denies the allegations that it interfered in the election.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
MANILA - A Filipino-American could oversee the investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into Russia's role in the 2016 presidential election if U.S. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein leaves his post.
Rosenstein is set to meet President Donald Trump at the White House on Thursday to discuss his future.
If Rosenstein leaves his job, the investigation would fall to US Solicitor General Noel Francisco, the fourth-ranking official at the Justice Department and the next Senate-confirmed official in line.
Some legal experts have said Francisco would have to recuse himself because his former law firm, Jones Day, represented the Trump campaign.
If that were to happen, the next in line to oversee the special counsel would be Steven Engel, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.
Francisco's credentials include serving as a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, working in the Justice Department during the George W. Bush administration and in Bush's legal team in the 2000 Florida recount.
The Republican lawyer is the son of Nemesio Francisco, a Filipino who immigrated to Oswego, New York to become a doctor.
According to Syracuse.com, Francisco rarely talked about his father's journey from the Philippines.
But he cited his father as an example for having the courage to accept hardships in life when he delivered the 2013 commencement address in Oswego High School. --With Reuters
source: news.abs-cbn.com
