by WorldTribune Staff, August 28, 2022
The release Friday of a heavily-redacted affidavit failed to shed light on the justification for the FBI's raid on former President Donald Trump's Palm Beach home Mar-a-Lago earlier this month, legal analysts said yesterday.
Meanwhile, less than half of Americans view the agency favorably, according to a new Convention of States-Trafalgar poll.
Which raises a fundamental question about the quintessentially American system described by President Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address as government "of, by and for the people": Has it become a police state?
Asked for their opinion on the Department of Justice and the FBI, 46.2% of respondents said they are "too political, corrupt, and not to be trusted," according to the survey.
68.3% of Republicans and almost half of people citing no party affiliation said the DOJ and FBI are "too political, corrupt, and not to be trusted."
For Democrat respondents, however, 73.7% said that the FBI and DOJ are "to be respected for their pursuit of justice and law and order."
Asked about motivations for the DOJ's grand jury investigation into Trump, overall responses were evenly split, with nearly half agreeing that the raid was carried out to stop Trump and nearly half disagreeing. Only 3% were unsure.
71.5% of Republicans surveyed agreed that the DOJ intended to block Trump from running again while 77.3% of Democrat respondents disagreed.
Were the FBI and DOJ truthful about the reasons for raiding Mar-a-Lago?
The poll found that the nation is split: Democrats tended to believe the agencies (77%) while Republicans did not (72.8%).
As for independents and unaffiliated respondents, they tended to believe that the DOJ and FBI was not truthful about reasons for the raid..
The poll of Aug. 19-23 surveyed 1,092 likely general election voters. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.9 percentage points.
