WASHINGTON (AP) – About half of Americans say they have little or no confidence that the Justice Department is handling the Hunter Biden investigation in an impartial and nonpartisan manner, and 1 in 3 very concerned that President Joe Biden may have done something wrong. action regarding his son’s business, according to a new survey. But the political division is very marked.
Sixty-six percent of Republicans — and just 7% of Democrats — are very worried or very worried that Joe Biden has done something wrong when it comes to his son’s business, according to a poll by The Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Democrats are generally more cautious about blaming the president for his son’s businesses.
“The way I see it, if Biden has done something wrong, then he should be held accountable for it,” said Pilar DeAvila Pinsley, 60, a Democrat from New York. “But there is no evidence that this is the case.”
The poll was conducted before House Speaker Kevin McCarthy launched an impeachment inquiry. It is intended to link the president to his son’s businesses and divert attention from former President Donald Trump’s legal problems, at a time when the two men are again vying for the White House.
The special prosecutor, appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland, indicted Hunter Biden on Thursday on charges of obtaining a gun, something that was discovered during the investigation of his tax operations. The investigation continues after a plea deal fell through this summer.
During the years of investigation, federal prosecutors did not show that Joe Biden was involved. And so far, Republicans have found no significant evidence of any wrongdoing by the president, who regularly talks to his vice president’s son and attends business dinners with with his son. For its part, the White House maintained that Joe Biden was not involved in Hunter’s business activities.
The claims did not stop Americans from remaining concerned, and the twists in the White House’s explanations – which initially insisted that Biden had not spoken to his son about his foreign businesses, and now it is said that the president is not involved in his son’s businesses – there is cause for concern.
Derik Wieland, 47, a Republican who lives outside Raleigh, North Carolina, said Biden has already identified some problems. “I don’t know a father who doesn’t know what his son is doing. “I would worry about a father who doesn’t know what his son is doing.”
The survey also found that only 19% of Americans have a great deal or complete confidence that the Justice Department is conducting investigations in an impartial and nonpartisan manner. Another 30% were somewhat confident, and 50% said they were not very confident or at all.
That stance is more common among Republicans: 79% say they have little or no confidence in the impartiality of the investigation. Even Democrats express moderate levels of confidence: 33% are very confident, 36% are somewhat confident, and 29% are somewhat confident.
The political polarization is a reflection of the wider division in the United States, and clear political lines are also drawn in the validity of the 2024 election, and the first attempt at the impeachment of Trump.
The poll showed that a majority of Americans, 56%, said they had heard at least some of the Hunter Biden investigation, although only 18% said they had heard a lot. Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say they have heard at least some about the investigations (68% to 51%) and that they have heard a lot (27% to 13%).
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The survey of 1,146 adults was conducted September 7-11, 2023, using a sample drawn from the NORC Center’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel designed to be representative of the US population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.
