Byron Donalds Mounts Defense of Trump’s Storage of Classified Docs, Insists It Wasn’t ‘Random’: ‘There Are 33 Bathrooms at Mar-a-Lago’

Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) chided CNN for its depiction of the former president Donald Trump’s storage of classified documents on Tuesday morning, citing the layout of the Mar-a-Lago Club and deliberate selection of the bathroom used to house the documents in defense of Trump.

In an interview with Phil Mattingly on CNN This Morning, Donalds addressed the charges against Trump made in a Department of Justice indictment last week.

After Mattingly asked him to respond to the fact that Trump was charged only for those documents he held onto after a protracted negotiation with federal authorities, Donalds launched into a lengthy defense of Trump:

Look, what I will tell you is again, I was not in the room with his attorneys when they were doing this. He and NARA [National Archives and Records Administration] are going and forth. NARA decided probably in the first time of its existence dealing with the former president that they wanted to bring the Department of Justice into this and the White House counsel had to sign off on this.

One other point I want to make: You guys are throwing up the pictures about they were in the bathroom or they were on the stage. As somebody who’s been to Mar-a-Lago, you can’t just walk through Mar-a-Lago of your own accord because Secret Service is all over the place. So if the documents are in a place, they’re in a room, depending on the time of year, you can’t even get into said room. There are 33 bathrooms at Mar-a-Lago, so don’t act like it’s just in some random bathroom where guests can go into. That’s not true. And so I think when you look at this information and you look at what’s come down in the indictment, an indictment is a one-sided argument from the prosecution. The president and his team is gonna have an opportunity to respond to this.

And actually in looking at the indictment, one of the things you also have to understand is there’s a lot of context issues here. The context you’re getting is directly from Jack Smith and deciding on what he thinks is relevant or not. Until the legal proceedings happen, you can’t go through that. But as a broader perspective, let’s be very clear that what you see here is a political prosecution of Donald Trump because former officials of our government who did not have declassification ability and were not the head of the executive branch, they did significantly worse things with material and classified material and the Department of Justice, previous iterations, just basically turned a blind eye and moved down the road. And that is why the American people look at this, they think it’s disgusting, and they think it’s a two-tiered justice system simply to go after President Trump.

Watch above via CNN.