According to a recent CNN poll, just 13 percent of people believe that former President Donald Trump is receiving fair treatment as a “criminal defendant” like others.
The poll seems to support Trump’s claim that the attempts to bankrupt him and imprison him are driven by political motives from the White House.
“This is a witch hunt and it’s a shame and it comes out of Washington,” Trump told reporters on Monday. “It’s in coordination with Washington, everything, including the DA’s office; it’s in coordination with Washington.”
The poll also found:
- 34 percent said Trump is being treated more harshly than other defendants
- 34 percent said Trump is being treated more leniently than other defendants
- 19 percent said they had not heard enough to say
- 0 percent had no opinion
In addition, the poll found that a majority of Americans were not confident in a fair outcome for the president:
- Only 44 percent had confidence in the jury chosen for the case to “be able to reach a fair verdict”
- 56 percent were skeptical that a “fair outcome is in the cards”
The CNN poll conducted between April 18-23 surveyed 1,212 adults with a margin of error of 3.4 points.
In the Trump criminal trial, Matthew Colangelo, a former DOJ official under Biden, presented the prosecution’s opening statement on Monday.
Alvin Bragg, the Democrat New York County District Attorney’s office, has recently recruited Colangelo. He is a former senior DOJ official known for targeting Trump during his previous tenure, according to the Washington Examiner.
Bragg did not hire Colangelo for his white-collar prosecutorial experience, which was lacking at the time he joined Bragg’s office. Rather, Bragg valued Colangelo’s “broad knowledge” of the Trump Organization, according to a New York Times report published at the end of 2022, during the same time frame that Bragg was seeking to ramp up his prosecution efforts against Trump.
Before his most recent stint at the DOJ, Colangelo had worked for Attorney General Letitia James, who investigated Trump for three years before bringing a massive civil lawsuit against Trump and the Trump Organization in the fall of 2022.
During his time in James’s office, Colangelo was involved in Trump’s civil case and also led federal initiatives, which involved, at the time, filing lawsuits against the Trump administration, as well as investigating the Trump Foundation.
A recent poll conducted by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research revealed that only approximately one-third of American adults think that Trump committed a criminal act in relation to the case.
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