A majority of voters say the Trump administration should cooperate with the House impeachment inquiry, according to a new Hill-HarrisX poll.
The survey, released Friday, showed 63 percent of voters saying the White House should comply with congressional requests for testimony and documents related to President Trump’s dealings with Ukraine.
Thirty-seven percent said the White House is well within its powers to reject Democrats’ requests and claim immunity under executive privilege.
Eighty-three percent of Democratic voters said the administration should comply with the congressional requests, compared to just 37 of Republicans who said the same. Independents sided with Democrats, with 65 percent saying the White House should cooperate.
More than half of Republican voters — 63 percent — said the administration can claim executive privilege in denying requests for documents and testimony, while only 17 percent of Democrats and 35 percent of independents agreed.
The survey comes a week after the White House announced it would refuse to cooperate with the impeachment probe. In a letter to top Democrats, White House counsel Pat Cipollone dismissed House Democrats’ impeachment as unconstitutional and strictly partisan.
The letter has not prevented some administration officials from providing closed-door testimony to the three House panels leading the inquiry.
House Democrats are looking into Trump’s July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in which he pressed for an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden.
Trump has repeatedly claimed there was “no quid pro quo” in his dealings with Ukraine. However, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney on Thursday indicated that the administration withheld almost $400 million in military aid to Ukraine in part because Trump wanted Kiev to investigate an unsubstantiated allegation involving a 2016 hack of the Democratic National Committee.
Mulvaney later walked back the comments and issued a statement accusing the media of “misconstruing” his initial remarks.
The Hill-HarrisX survey was conducted online among 1,001 registered voters from Oct. 11-12. The margin of error for the full sampling is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
—Tess Bonn
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