About six out of every ten U.S. adults, or 59 percent, believe President Donald Trump’s interactions with Ukraine that triggered the impeachment probe amount to something “unethical but not illegal” or “nothing wrong” at all, according to a recent poll.
The poll, conducted by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs and released on Friday, reveals that 29 percent believe Trump’s interactions with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky are “unethical but not illegal.”
Another 30 percent say there is “nothing wrong” with the Trump-Zelensky interactions, while 38 percent say Trump’s Ukraine-linked actions amount to “something illegal.”
In other words, 59 percent of respondents believe Trump’s Ukraine-linked actions are neither illegal (29 percent) nor wrong (30 percent).
Predictably, more Democrats (69 percent) believe Trump’s actions were illegal than Republicans (eight percent). Among Independents, however, nearly two-thirds (63 percent) believe Trump’s actions amounted to something “unethical but not illegal” (43 percent) or “nothing wrong” (20 percent).
Only 27 percent of Independents believe Trump’s actions were illegal.
The number (80 percent) of those who think Trump has neither done something illegal (66 percent) nor wrong (14 percent) is also high among the 13 percent who neither approve nor disapprove of the impeachment probe.
Only 18 percent of those who are neutral on the impeachment inquiry believe Trump has done something illegal.
House Democrat impeachment investigators are supposed to be trying to determine whether Trump pressured Zelensky to investigate corruption allegations against Joe Biden and his son Hunter in exchange for aid during a July 25 phone call. There are signs, however, that the Democrats are engaged in a fishing expedition that will likely expand the probe far beyond Ukraine.
The recent poll finds that a vast majority (69 percent) of adults believe “it was inappropriate for” Hunter “to have a role on the board of a Ukrainian energy company while his father was vice president. Only 27% think it was appropriate.
Trump has urged his Ukrainian counterpart to launch a probe into corruption allegations against the energy company Burisma Holdings that employed Hunter Biden.
While giving his deposition in the impeachment probe, top State Department official George Kent told House investigators that the Obama administration “rebuffed” his warnings that Burisma was corrupt.
That means the Obama administration cleared Hunter Biden to work at Burisma even though it knew the company was corrupt.
The AP-NORC pollsters note:
The nationwide poll was conducted October 24-28, 2019, using the AmeriSpeak® Panel, the probability-based panel of NORC at the University of Chicago. Online and telephone interviews using landlines and cell phones were conducted with 1,075 adults. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 4.1 percentage points.
According to the poll, 47 percent of adults approve of the impeachment inquiry, compared to 38 percent who do not and 13 percent who neither approve nor disapprove.
That means slightly more than half (51 percent) are either neutral or disapprove of the probe.
Unsurprisingly, more Democrats (83 percent) support the probe than Republicans (11 percent). Meanwhile, more than half (58 percent) of Independents are either neutral (28 percent) or disapprove (30 percent) of the inquiry.
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