Willie R. Tubbs, FISM News
Longtime Republican adviser Roger Stone’s strongly worded criticism of the Biden administration’s use of the FBI resonated with just over half the people who participated in a recent conservative opinion poll.
Last November, during an interview with WABC Radio in New York, Stone said, “We have a group of politicized thugs at the top of the FBI who are using the FBI … as [President] Joe Biden‘s personal Gestapo.”
At the time, the statement was received as largely hyperbolic, but the FBI raid on former President Donald Trump’s Florida home has enraged a sizable chunk of the American voter population against the federal law enforcement agency.
When Rasmussen Reports, a conservative political opinion research organization, surveyed 1,000 likely U.S. voters in mid-August, 53% of respondents indicated they agreed with Stone’s sentiment. Rasmussen assigned a plus-minus ratio of two percentage points to its survey.
Notably, that result is up from 46% of the respondents to a December 2021 Rasmussen survey who agreed with Stone’s statement.
Fifty percent of respondents said they still viewed the FBI favorably, compared to 46% who said they viewed the agency unfavorably. By comparison in May 2020, about 60% of the respondents viewed the FBI favorably.
These numbers present the picture of a nation in which some likely voters view the FBI favorably, but also agree that the agency is behaving as the modern equivalent of the Nazi secret police.
The poll highlights the nation’s polarized political climate, as the overwhelming majority of Democrats (75%) view the FBI favorably and an almost identical percentage of Republicans (76%) endorse Stone’s statement.
According to Rassmussen, just under half (49%) of independent respondents agreed with the Stone statement.