President Joe Biden’s favorability rating dropped eight points in six months to the lowest of his presidency, a CNN poll found Tuesday.
During investigations into potential wrongdoing by Joe Biden for allegedly accepting a $5 million bribe from a Ukrainian oligarch, the president’s approval rating slumped from 40 points in January to 35 points in May to 32 points in June.
Joe Biden’s high watermark approval rating was in January 2021 at 59 points. But after a few months on the job, Joe Biden ordered the deadly Afghan withdrawal and signed massive spending bills that fueled 40-year-high inflation.
By the summer of 2022, Biden’s approval rating had sunk to 36 points. It rebounded, however, in December 2022 to 42 points after many of the pandemic restrictions were either defeated in court or lifted by the Biden administration.
But as the House Republicans retook the chamber upon defeating Democrats in the midterm elections, Joe Biden became the target of an oversight investigation.
In March, the probe identified three Biden family members who, collectively, received $1.3 million wired through a Biden associate from a Chinese energy company two months after President Joe Biden left the vice presidency.
In May, it found the Biden family business, over the course of several years, received at least $10 million from business schemes in Romania and China in return for what appears to be influence peddling. In total, nine Biden family members received payments from the family foreign business ventures, including two of Joe Biden’s grandchildren.
In June, the FBI provided Congress with an informant document that alleged Joe Biden accepted a $5 million bribe from Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky. According to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the document said Zlochevsky kept 17 audio recordings of his conversations with Joe and Hunter Biden as an “insurance policy.”
Watch — Grassley: Foreign National in Alleged Biden Bribery Scheme Has “Insurance Policy” Recordings of Joe and Hunter
Recent polling shows 83 percent of voters believe the FBI should make public its informant file that alleges Joe Biden accepted a $5 million bribe from Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky. Moreover, a majority of voters believe Joe Biden took the $5 million bribe.
The CNN poll sampled 1,350 respondents from June 13-17 with a 3.4 percent margin of error.
Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality.