Forty-three percent of registered voters said that reports Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein considered recording his conversations with President Trump and attempting to remove the president from office should disqualify him from overseeing the federal probe into Russian election meddling.
Thirty-three percent of respondents said the reported comments, which Rosenstein denies, should not disqualify him. Another 23 percent said they were unsure.
The question divided voters along party lines, with 67 percent of Republicans saying the comments disqualify the deputy attorney general, while 50 percent of Democrats said the comments do not.
“People feel that he is biased, and people have some sense of fairness that even [if] they don’t like the president, they feel like he should still be treated fairly under the law,” Emily Ekins, polling director at the Cato Institute, told Hill.TV’s Joe Concha on “What America’s Thinking.”
Rosenstein started overseeing the Russia probe last year after Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself.
The New York Times reported last month that Rosenstein had openly talked about secretly recording Trump in the Oval Office, and had discussed the possibility of the Cabinet using the 25th Amendment to oust the president from office.
Rosenstein has called the Times article “factually incorrect” and some officials defending Rosenstein separately said his comments were made in jest.
The report fueled speculation that Rosenstein could resign or that Trump would fire him, but that speculation has cooled after a meeting between the two was delayed several times.
The American Barometer was conducted on September 29 to 30 among 1,000 registered voters. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
— Julia Manchester
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