Poll: 64 percent believe Trump committed crimes before he was president

A majority of voters believe that President Trump committed crimes before he was president, according to a poll released Tuesday. 

The Quinnipiac University survey found that 64 percent of respondents believe that Trump broke the law before taking office, while only 24 percent do not. The rest either don’t know or are unsure.

The results were split along party lines, with 33 percent of Republicans polled saying Trump committed crimes as a private citizen, while 48 percent disagree. Democratic respondents, however, overwhelmingly — at 89 percent — believe the president broke the law before entering the White House; only 5 percent disagree.

{mosads}Respondents were divided on whether they believe Trump has committed crimes while in office, with 45 percent believing he has and 43 percent believing he has not. These responses were also extremely partisan: Just 12 percent of Republican respondents believe Trump committed a crime as president, compared to 75 percent of Democrats.

Trump has been laboring under the shadow of multiple legal investigations, most prominently that of special counsel Robert Mueller, who is probing Russia’s 2016 election interference and whether Moscow colluded with the Trump campaign. Several people close to Trump’s campaign have been indicted in or convicted of crimes as a result of Mueller’s probe.

Trump’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, was sentenced last year to three years in jail for charges including bank fraud, campaign finance violations and lying to Congress, crimes he said he undertook at Trump’s behest.

Cohen testified before Congress on Wednesday and accused the president of directing him to pay women to keep silent about alleged affairs with Trump, as well as being aware in advance that WikiLeaks planned during the 2016 campaign to release Democratic emails that U.S. intelligence agencies believe were hacked by Russian agents. 

Trump’s business and presidential inauguration are also under investigation by prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, as well as multiple congressional inquiries.

Quinnipiac researchers surveyed 1,120 voters across the country between March 1 and 4. The poll has a margin of error of 3.4 percentage points.