The biggest, most important Republican, certainly in politics right now
is the Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who actually talked about false equivalency.
Listen to McCarthy here.
>> Is that a good look for the former president to have boxes in a bathroom?
>> I don't know, is it a good picture to have boxes in a garage that opens up
all the time, a bathroom door locks?
>> [LAUGH] That's what they're going to now, right?
McCarthy is talking about the fact that these were in a bathroom.
Where they weren't was the National Archives,
where they weren't was the White House.
And he's talking about Joe Biden having had documents himself, that he announced
that he said, come get, come look at, look everywhere in my house and get them.
Similarly, former Vice President Mike Pence did the same thing.
That's the way these things should be handled when they happen,
they shouldn't happen, obviously, and I think there's gonna be a review of that.
But that is where he kept them.
You can see the picture here.
It's a Mar-a-Lago bathroom, a ballroom,
a storage room on the ground floor of the place.
And you had people saying that it's hard to get in there.
I don't know if we have Byron Donald's sound.
Do we have that video?
Because here's Congressman Byron Donald from Florida talking about that.
>> You guys are throwing up the pictures about they were in a bathroom or
they were on a stage.
As somebody who's been to Mar-a-Lago, you just can't 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 sitting room.
There are 33 bathrooms at Mar-a-Lago, so don't act like it's just in some random
bathroom that the guests can go into, that's not true.
>> But the guests can go where Donald Trump can
wave around secretive nuclear document, can't they Max Burns?
>> Yeah, I guess it's good in Donald's mind that you only have a 1 in 33
chance of jeopardizing national security and stealing the nukes.
It involves looking past the point, which all these Republicans are doing.
That it's not about how secure where he put them was it's that he shouldn't have
had them at all and that he made active efforts to hide them.
The fact that the bathroom has a lock while the giant human sized
window next to it doesn't, and it's so
much talking past this point and hoping you just won't notice.
>> Right, and it's also where they're not, right?
>> [CROSSTALK] >> In the bathroom,
they are in the ballroom, where are they not, right?
>> [CROSSTALK] >> They're not safely secure in
the archive that's the point.
It's not about how safe it theoretically is at Donald Trump's place of living.
That's besides the point, this stuff is supposed to be under lock and key.
Absolutely unable to be viewed or seen or interpreted by people who don't
have the highest levels of security clearance in the government.
That's the point there.
I'm not really sure what that brother was trying to get at with that one.
>> Yeah, it is unclear.
And not to mention they weren't only in one of the 33 bathrooms.
They were in a storage room, a room that could be reached through multiple
entrances, including a door leading from the pool patio that was often kept open,
according to the indictment.
More than 80 boxes were kept there, according to prosecutors.
But, again, it's all about what did Biden do?
In the childish back and forth that the speaker of the House had with some
reporters yesterday, he went on to talk about those false equivalencies.
Here is the esteemed speaker.
>> I don't want people to take these documents away, the Vice President Pence,
but as a senator, you'd have to steal the document.
>> [CROSSTALK] >> You have a lot of
these documents behind a Corvette in a garage with the doors wide open.
You've got a son of Hunter Biden who knows who he has there in and out.
There's a lot of concerns on both sides.
>> Mr. Speaker- >> The son of Hunter Biden,
they have to find any way they can to say Hunter Biden to make things equal.
Yeah, but Hunter Biden, Hunter I don't even know what he was talking about.
You have the son of Hunter Biden there.
But, here's the difference, right?
He's talking about Joe Biden's garage.
He's talking about the people that could have come to President Biden's home.
Joe Biden, when he found out about it and
when his administration found out about it, contacted the FBI and
the National Archives and said, we have these come and get them.
Don't know how they got here.
There was no intent, right?
There wasn't intent on the part of Mike Pence.
Same thing, wasn't intent on the part of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
These documents ended up there.
They were reported by those people and their staffs said, come and get them.
They went and got them without incident.
When they went to get the documents from Donald Trump, there was pushback,
there was blocking, there was obfuscation constantly.
And that's part of this indictment.
Mike Levine of ABC News saying by contrast to what happened with the others.
The indictment against Donald Trump not only says that nearly all of the 31
documents he's charged with willfully retaining at his Mar-a-Lago estate were
marked as classified.
But it also details alleged conversations and actions showing that he allegedly
knew he took and held onto classified documents from the White House.
That's the difference.
Not just the fact that the others didn't resist,
not just the fact that those documents were there.
But he allegedly knew and he took and
held onto classified documents from the White House.
When Biden's personal attorneys first found classified documents in private
offices associated with Biden.
They said they notified the National Archives and Records Administration and
they helped the government retrieve them.
Trump, on the other hand, is saying that he tried to obstruct justice.
The Justice Department is saying he tried to obstruct justice.
This is the Washington Post,
those allegations include moving boxes out of a storage room.
Telling an attorney to search that room for
classified material without saying that dozens of boxes were being kept elsewhere.
Suggesting an attorney hide or destroy documents that had been subpoenaed.
And causing another person to make false statements about whether all
the classified documents had been produced.
This is a crime and this is blatant, if proven,
this is really ugly stuff.
>> Yeah, it feels like they got this guy dead to rights, honestly.
We'll see whether or not cuz let's face it, presidents just don't get locked up.
That's just not something that we do to them.
Even when they had been found to have committed crimes.
You think of Richard Nixon, for instance.
Not only did he not get locked up, he got pardoned later on,
and everybody was, no, we're getting over it.
We still like Dick Nixon.
It's this sort of fraternal order where they don't turn on their own.
But usually we're talking about crimes that were done in office, right?
This guy had the misfortune of committing major crimes while out of office.
But I think what you see there with McCarthy is the general strategy
of the GOP as it pertains to the stuff that Trump is getting indicted for.
It's this idea that these aren't big deals, right?
This guy, he might have had some documents on his person, no big deal,
nobody got hurt, there was no intent.
Yes, there are rules against this, but he's the President.
You might understand why we're able to bend some rules for him.
The situation in New York involving Stormy Daniels,
I think their strategy is gonna be the same.
And appeal to normal people and say, should a guy really go to jail for
paying a prostitute not to put his business out on the streets, right?
Hush money, essentially, I think they're gonna appeal to people's sensibility
that this isn't something that you lock a guy up and throw away the key for.
And to be honest, guys, just to put this in a little bit of different perspective.
I think about all of the people from the Trump regime and
all the Iraqis that got killed, all the trillions of dollars we wasted knowing
that these guys lied to us intentionally on purpose to send us there.
Some people they never saw, even a courtroom, even the threat of one.
And I think that's what the GOP is gonna appeal to.
Just the idea that people have gotten away with way worse and
not had to go to jail for it.
>> For a second I got scared you said, and to be honest, guys,
I thought you were gonna tell us that you paid off a prostitute.
>> [LAUGH].
>> I'm glad [INAUDIBLE].
>> Who among us has?
>> Who among us?
By the way, Jerry Springer, who we recently lost,
paid a prostitute with a cheque.
One of the most unbelievable stories in American political history.
He was mayor of Cincinnati.
Max, let's get back to this, though, the real stuff here.
Pick up what Omas was saying, I'm sure you have a lot to say on this as well.
>> Yeah, I'm genuinely curious who Kevin McCarthy is arguing with,
because there's not a single Democrat in America who says that Joe Biden had
a right to have those documents.
There's not Joe Biden, not anybody.
They worked immediately to turn them over.
And I think where this really hurts the Republican Party is now the American
people are gonna try to understand this issue and they're gonna look for
clear messaging.
On the Democratic side, that's easy.
Donald Trump's a crook, he stole battle plans.
The guy's dangerous.
But on the right, you don't see any clear messaging.