James Comey: Nearly 70% of US voters disapprove of the FBI Director, finds poll

The survey revealed that though Mr Comey has a low job approval rating, the majority think Presdient Trump's claims about wiretapping are false

FBI Director James Comey has low job approval ratings. (Getty / Zach Gibson)

A poll of registered voters showed they have a negative view of FBI Director James Comey by a two-to-one margin.

The Harvard-Harris Poll survey was only released in full to The Hill newspaper. It surveyed 2,092 registered voters - Democrat, Republican, and Indepedent - online from 14 to 16 March.

The poll showed that 35 per cent of those voters had a negative view of Mr Comey and 17 per cent had what the respondents deemed a positive view.

The Hill pointed out that even at the height of the red scare and McCarthyism, when Senator Joe McCarthy led the charge to root out Communists in the US, 78 per cent of voters thought FBI Director J Edgar Hoover, Jr was doing a good job according to a 1953 Gallup poll.

Harvard-Harris Poll co-director Mark Penn told The Hill that Mr Comey’s poll results likely points to “a crisis of confidence in his leadership as top law enforcement officer".

Mr Comey now infamously threw a wrench into the 2016 presidential campaign only a little over a week before election day when he revealed the FBI had discovered more emails relevant to their prior investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server for State Department communications.

On 20 March, Mr Comey appeared before a Congressional committee and refuted President Trump’s absurd tweets accusing former President Obama of wiretapping Trump Tower in New York during the 2016 campaign.

He also testified that members of the Trump campaign were currently under investigation by the FBI for ties to Russia.

Sixty per cent of the voters surveyed said they would prefer an independent party to investigate the “investigate Russian meddling in the election and Trump’s wiretapping claims,” according to The Hill.

The poll also revealed something else interesting. Despite the unfavourable rating for Mr Comey, “54 per cent of voters don’t think members of the Trump team illicitly colluded with the Russians over the campaign”.

About 60 per cent also said they believed Trump campaign staff’s meetings with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak “were part of normal contact with a foreign government” while 40 per cent thought the meeting was something more nefarious.

In a show that the voter respondents are following the real news, 66 per cent of voters say “they don’t believe the former president spied on the current president,” The Hill reported.

In a sign that may explain Mr Trump’s historically low 39 per cent overall approval rating, 40 per cent of survey respondents think he spends too much time worrying about Russia and wiretapping.