There was no definitive conclusion that President Trump had been involved in criminal acts, the sort of thing that would seemingly have shifted Americans’ views of the president’s actions. Instead, Mueller offered Trump a clean bill of health on direct coordination with Russia’s two-pronged interference effort and catalogued a number of obstruction-of-justice-like actions by Trump, while reserving judgment on whether Trump crossed a legal line. Attorney General William P. Barr stepped in, declaring that no line was crossed.

The report considered a relatively small window of Trump’s life, focusing on the year-plus that he was a candidate and his tenure in the White House. Nonetheless, Republicans were a lot less likely to say they thought Trump had committed crimes before taking office in a Quinnipiac University poll taken after the Mueller report came out than they were willing to say that in a poll taken in March.

Bear in mind, this wasn’t really Mueller’s charge. The special counsel focused on the question of Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible coordination with Trump’s campaign. That probe did branch out into pre-campaign criminal activity undertaken by Trump’s one-time campaign chairman Paul Manafort, but it’s not clear how robustly Mueller and his team sought to identify pre-politics criminal activity by the president himself.

Quinnipiac’s polling also shows that Republicans were slightly less likely to say that Trump had committed crimes as president after the report came out — mostly because most didn’t think Trump had done so in the first place.

This is actually an interesting finding. After all, there was a great deal of evidence presented by Mueller to suggest that Trump had repeatedly tried to throw the investigation off course. While Mueller didn’t argue that those actions amounted to criminal obstruction, the report pointedly noted that Trump could not be exonerated of such charges. While Barr (and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein) established that the letter of the law had not been violated, other experts disagreed.

Quinnipiac asked about that, too. Or, more accurately, it asked if Trump tried to obstruct the investigation — using the legal term — or to derail it, a general term that would certainly seem to include the sorts of efforts documented in the report. But over the course of Mueller’s investigation, opinions on that question remained essentially static. Democrats have always mostly thought Trump tried to derail the probe; Republicans have always thought he didn’t. Even after Mueller’s articulation of Trump’s actions was made public.

(The report’s release is indicated with the vertical dashed line reading “REPORT.” Barr’s March 24 letter summarizing the Mueller report is indicated with “LETTER.”)

There was one change observed in Quinnipiac’s polling. Support for impeachment dropped after the release of the report, perhaps in part because there was no assertion made by Mueller that provable criminal acts by the president had occurred.

That shift was subtle.

This one wasn’t.

In early March, a third of Republicans thought Mueller was conducting a fair investigation. At the end of the month, in a poll conducted in part after Barr’s letter was released, nearly half of Republicans said the probe was fair. In the new poll? Two-thirds of Republicans indicated that Mueller had conducted the investigation with fairness.