A majority of voters say they believe President Biden’s handling of classified documents found at his home and his former office is a serious breach of national security, according to a new Harvard CAPS-Harris poll released exclusively to The Hill on Friday.
The poll found that 64 percent of respondents said they consider “the presence of these classified documents in several unsecure locations to be a serious breach of national security.” Another 36 percent said they consider it to be a minor breach of national security.
“Most voters think that the Biden classified documents are a serious issue and the voters want full answers and investigations of it,” said Mark Penn, the co-director of the Harvard CAPS-Harris poll. “The Biden White House has appeared flat-footed so far on this issue.”
Biden and his administration are in hot water for their handling of the revelations. CBS News reported that those documents were discovered on Nov. 2 at a Washington, D.C., office that once belonged to Biden in between his time as vice president and president.
Additionally, over the past two weeks, the White House has confirmed that two more batches of documents were found at his Wilmington, Del., home, including in his garage.
Last week, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Special Counsel Robert Hur to investigate the matter.
The Harvard CAPS-Harris poll found that 83 percent of respondents said the FBI should investigate how the classified documents were displaced, while 17 percent said the FBI should not investigate the matter.
Meanwhile, 77 percent of respondents said the House of Representatives should investigate, while 23 percent said it should not.
White House officials have repeatedly said they are limited in what they can say, citing the ongoing investigation.
Biden took questions from reporters on the matter Thursday in California.
“I think you’re going to find there’s nothing there. I have no regrets, I’m following what the lawyers have told me they want me to do. That’s exactly what we’re doing. There’s no ‘there’ there,” Biden said.
However, the revelations have still led to comparisons between the investigation into Biden and the Justice Department’s investigation into a trove of classified documents found at former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home last year.
The Biden administration and the president’s team have argued that Biden handled the situation differently than Trump by immediately notifying the National Archives of the revelation while Trump resisted doing so.
Still, Republicans have said there has been a double standard in how the investigations have been viewed.
The Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll survey was conducted Jan. 18-19 and surveyed 2,050 registered voters. It is a collaboration of the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University and the Harris Poll. The survey is an online sample drawn from the Harris Panel and weighted to reflect known demographics. As a representative online sample, it does not report a probability confidence interval.