A day after Home Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) defended former President Donald Trump’s hoarding of categorised paperwork by invoking toilet door locks, MAGA-boosting Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) took that excuse a number of hilarious steps additional on Thursday morning.
Simply hours earlier than Trump is scheduled to be arraigned at a federal courthouse in downtown Miami, Donalds appeared on CNN This Morning to hawk the GOP’s newest speaking factors in protection of the twice-impeached ex-president.
Donalds, whose identify has been bandied about as Trump’s potential 2024 working mate, started the interview by attacking Particular Counsel Jack Smith for charging Trump below the Espionage Act. Smith’s 37-count indictment of Trump accuses the previous president of breaking seven federal legal guidelines, together with willful retention of nationwide protection data, partaking in a conspiracy to hinder justice, withholding a authorities report, concealing an official doc, hiding a report from a federal investigation, making false statements and a scheme to hide.
After Donalds claimed that Smith’s indictment is “plain ridiculous” as a result of Trump ought to have been allowed to evaluate his information “for as much as 5 years,” CNN host Phil Mattingly pressed the congressman on what the indictment truly revealed. Particularly, that Trump wouldn’t have been charged with any crimes if he had merely voluntarily handed the categorised paperwork again to the Nationwide Archives and didn’t try to cover them.
At this level, Donalds determined to carry up the indictment together with images of paperwork being saved in a Mar-a-Lago toilet and bathe, insisting that there was nothing insecure concerning the storage location. Why? As a result of the ex-president’s non-public membership has a number of bogs.
“You guys are throwing up the images about they have been in a rest room or on a stage,” the pro-Trump congressman declared. “As any person who has been to Mar-a-Lago, you’ll be able to’t stroll via Mar-a-Lago of your individual accord as a result of Secret Service is in all places. So if the paperwork are in a spot, they’re in a room, relying on the time of yr, you’ll be able to’t even get into mentioned room.”
It simply acquired higher from there.
“There are 33 bogs at Mar-a-Lago!” Donalds exclaimed. “So don’t act prefer it’s in some random toilet that the company can go into. That is not true!”
Donalds’ remarks come after McCarthy was extensively mocked for trying to shrug off Trump hiding categorised paperwork in varied places in Mar-a-Lago by noting that loo doorways may be locked. The speaker seemed to be attempting to attract parallels between Trump’s and President Joe Biden’s categorised docs probes.
“Is it a very good image to have packing containers in a storage that opens up on a regular basis? A rest room door locks,” McCarthy instructed reporters on Monday. It didn’t take lengthy for critics to point out that loo doorways solely lock from the inside.
Probably the most ardent MAGA defenders in D.C. have struggled to provide you with a coherent protection of the ex-president for the reason that indictment was unsealed on Friday, particularly for the reason that indictment destroys their earlier defenses of him.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), for example, twisted himself into knots on Sunday backing Trump’s contradictory claims that he had beforehand declassified all of the paperwork, regardless of proof exhibiting Trump was acutely conscious they remained categorised. “What you’re saying simply doesn’t make sense on its face, CNN anchor Dana Bash instructed Jordan at one level.