By Noah Rothman
Thursday, August 17, 2023
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.
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