The majority of voters think President Biden was consulted about and profited from Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings, according to a poll showing that suspicions about influence peddling and corruption are not subsiding as the president’s term approaches the halfway mark.
A whopping 62% of likely voters told Rasmussen Reports that Mr. Biden was likely involved in Hunter Biden’s far-flung business dealings, including at least one deal involving a company in mainland China.
One-third of voters said they don’t think it’s likely that Mr. Biden was consulted about his son’s deals.
“The abandoned laptop that revealed Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealing remains an important story, according to voters, many of whom think it could have changed the 2020 election,” the pollsters said.
Indeed, questions aren’t going away about foreign business deals brokered by Hunter Biden and other family members while Mr. Biden was vice president in the Obama administration.
Recently revealed emails from the laptop computer showed Hunter Biden telling a business partner that he would be “happy” to introduce their associates to a Chinese Communist Party official he met in Beijing during a 2013 trip with his vice presidential father.
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The request for the introduction, which Fox News first reported, came from a former partner in Hunter Biden’s investment firm that the government-controlled Bank of China financed.
Prosecutors are reportedly weighing charges against Hunter Biden for tax violations and false statements to federal authorities about improperly buying a firearm. How close the investigation gets to the president remains to be seen.
As more comes to light about how the Justice Department, social media and news organizations intentionally suppressed stories during the 2020 campaign about the contents of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop computer, voters are split on whether it would have changed the outcome of the presidential race.
Nearly half of respondents, 48%, said Mr. Biden likely would not have won the election if Hunter Biden’s laptop computer received more media coverage.
About the same amount, 46%, said they don’t think the story would have changed the election results, according to the poll.
Many news outlets did not report about the laptop computer, which was discovered in October 2020 after it was abandoned in a Delaware repair shop. News organizations, social media platforms and Democratic-allied pundits cited fears that the laptop could be Russian disinformation and another attempt to meddle in a U.S. presidential election. But the laptop’s contents, which include evidence of how Hunter Biden attempted to use his family connections to grease business deals overseas, were eventually confirmed by legacy news operations such as The New York Times.
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The results of the Rasmussen survey, conducted Aug. 31 and Sept. 1 among 1,000 likely voters, arrive as the FBI faces increased accusations of politicization. Those accusations extend to the FBI’s raid of former President Donald Trump’s residence and office at his private Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida. It was the first time federal law enforcement searched the home of a former U.S. president.
Whistleblowers say federal investigators slow-walked the probe into Mr. Biden’s son until after the 2020 election. Republicans have promised to investigate the charges if they win control of Congress. The laptop, which contains emails, text messages, photos and other material related to Hunter Biden’s business deals, was initially dismissed by the intelligence community and much of the media as Russian disinformation.
Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, a Republican who has led calls for the FBI watchdog to investigate how the agency has handled the case, said last month that an FBI whistleblower has revealed the “FBI’s apparent corruption” in the Hunter Biden investigation.
“After the FBI obtained the Hunter Biden laptop from the Wilmington, DE computer shop, these whistleblowers stated that local FBI leadership told employees, ‘you will not look at that Hunter Biden laptop’ and that the FBI is ‘not going to change the outcome of the election again,’” Mr. Johnson, the ranking member of the permanent subcommittee on investigations, wrote to Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz.
Mr. Johnson and Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, presented bank records showing that Hunter Biden and the president’s brother, James Biden, received millions of dollars from companies tied to China.
Hunter Biden has denied any wrongdoing, and the White House has rejected the notion that Mr. Biden ever discussed foreign business dealings with his son.
Still, Hunter Biden and his laptop computer remain a thorn in the administration’s side.
The FBI investigation began in 2018. U.S. Attorney David Weiss in Delaware, appointed by Mr. Trump, is leading the probe.
The CEO of Meta, formerly known as Facebook, said last week that the popular social media website limited exposure to stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop on the platform after receiving warnings about potential disinformation from the FBI.
Mark Zuckerberg defended the action to podcaster Joe Rogan because Russia attempted to use Facebook during the 2016 election.
The existence of the laptop was first reported by the New York Post ahead of the 2020 election and was widely ridiculed as propagating false information from Russia, only to later be reported about by a wide range of media outlets.
The Rasmussen survey had a margin of error of 3 percentage points.
• Ramsey Touchberry can be reached at rtouchberry@washingtontimes.com.
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