Rep. Byron Donalds got into a heated exchange with a CNN host over former President Donald Trump’s indictment, even as he called out the 45th president’s 2016 rival.
The Florida Republican noted that while Trump has been charged with 37 federal counts related to his handling of classified materials, Donalds noted that his situation isn’t even close to the seriousness of Democratic figures like then-Vice President Joe Biden and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over their possession of highly classified materials.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 going to have an opportunity to respond to this. And actually, in looking at the indictment, one of the things you also have to understand is that there is a lot of context issues here,” Donalds noted.
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“The context you are getting 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. Adds as a broader perspective, what you see 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 document 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,” he added.
The host responded, “Your view and I think the view that reflects what I think Scott Jennings made clear a lot of Republicans feel based on what they have seen. I think these are very different…”