A new poll tells a shocking bit of news about how the public is responding to Hunter Biden’s scandalous conduct.
Buried at the bottom of ABC News’s write-up of the poll it commissioned with Ipsos — a dispatch that covers the waterfront of public opinion surrounding all the many sordid affairs that involve Donald Trump — lies a shocking bit of news about how the public is responding to Hunter Biden’s scandalous conduct and how his father’s administration is handling it:
A plurality of Americans (48%) are not confident that the U.S. Justice Department is handling its investigation of Hunter Biden in a fair and nonpartisan manner, while only 32% express confidence in the investigation.
According to Ipsos, the survey showed that fewer than one-third of Americans believe the Justice Department is conducting the investigation and prosecution of Hunter Biden in a “fair and nonpartisan manner.” In plainer words, a plurality of Americans see — or, at least, are not willing to dismiss — the appearance of corruption in the administration’s handling of the allegations that the president’s son enriched himself by retailing access to the highest echelons of the American government.
Partisan divisions in this country are so entrenched that it is difficult to establish a consensus this broad around any politically charged issue, much less one that directly implicates the incumbent president. Ipsos doesn’t break its findings down by party affiliation, but we can safely assume that just about every Republican and a plurality, if not a majority, of independents declined to express confidence in the DOJ’s handling of the Hunter probe. But we can also deduce that a substantial number of Democrats joined them in declining to register satisfaction with the government’s handling of the case.
What’s more interesting about this finding is that it is happening parallel to the issues on which the national news media is fixated. House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer’s memos aren’t generating national headlines beyond conservative media venues. The nightly network-news broadcasts aren’t devoting outsize attention to the government’s conduct of this investigation. To survey the media landscape is to forget that it was less than one week ago that the Justice Department took the extraordinary step of appointing a special counsel to prosecute the president’s son — proceedings which special counsel David Weiss indicated are inevitable now that Hunter Biden’s cushy plea agreement collapsed. The public is devoting its attention to this scandal and forming negative opinions about it independent of media’s nudging and goading.
Those opinions are likely to calcify into something durable in the absence of any counternarrative from Democrats and their allies in the press. Maybe there is no plausible counternarrative. But, if there is, voters either aren’t aware of it or don’t buy it. In the absence of an argument that exculpates the Biden family, the public is reaching to the conclusion that something rather untoward happened here. Indeed, it’s likely that we’re only learning about the scale of Hunter’s alleged misconduct because the inept attempt to cover it up imploded upon first contact with a courtroom. That’s an ugly narrative. And if the polls are any indication, it’s one in which a growing number of voters believe.