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Poll: Support for Impeachment Probe Hits High of 55%

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JOSHUA CAPLAN

23 Oct 20192,284

3:29

A newly-released poll shows support for the House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump has hit a new high.

According to a Quinnipiac University survey, 55 percent of respondents said they support the impeachment probe, while 43 percent stated they oppose it. The same poll found last week that 51 percent backed the inquiry and 45 percent disapproved it.

Opposition to impeachment remains high among Republicans with nearly nine in ten Republicans, or 88 percent, stating they are against it. Conversely, 93 percent of Democrats approve of the inquiry, as well as 58 percent of independents. Approval for the inquiry climbed eight percent among independents, the poll shows. Further, the survey states President Trump’s approval rating fell under 40 percent for the first time since the probe started as 38 percent of respondents said they approve of his job performance, while 58 percent disapprove.

The poll, which had 1,587 respondents, was conducted between October 17st and 21st and had a margin of error of just over three percent.

The poll comes as House Democrats continue to move swiftly with an inquiry that was launched in the wake of a partisan CIA officer’s so-called “whistleblower” complaint claiming the president pressured the leader of Ukraine to investigate allegations of corruption against former vice president and 2020 candidate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.

Both President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky have repeatedly denied any pressure was applied to probe the Biden family, and in a nod to transparency, the White House publically released a transcript of the world leaders’ July 25th conversation to show no pressure or quid pro quo occurred.

The survey also comes as House Republicans have reached a breaking point with how House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) has run the closed-door impeachment inquiry.

Laura Cooper, a senior official who oversees Ukraine policy, arrived Wednesday morning on Capitol Hill to appear before the House panels conducting the investigation. Shortly afterward, more than two dozen Republican House members held a news conference outside the secure room in the Capitol where the deposition was taking place.

The Republicans decried that the deposition was happening behind closed doors and said Americans should be able to read the transcripts of any interviews being conducted as part of impeachment.

Republicans then walked into the meeting unannounced, and the deposition was put on hold. The two sides were trying to resolve the standoff, Republicans who left the meeting said.

House Foreign Affairs Committee member Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY) said during the press conference:

The members are still there. We want to hear from this witness. But we want our colleagues to hear from this witness, too. Especially those members who are on the House Armed Services Committee. The person coming to testify is from the Department of Defense.

This is more the jurisdiction of the House Armed Services Committee than it is than any of the other three committees [involved in the impeachment inquiry]. But we want the deposition to take place, but we don’t want it to be happening so much in secret that even most of Congress can’t even know what’s going on.

Last week, 184 House Republicans voted in favor of a resolution to censure Schiff for his handling of the impeachment probe.