Rubio: White House records at Mar-a-Lago ‘not a crime, I don’t believe’

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) on Monday rebuffed concerns that have risen in recent weeks over former President Trump’s handling of his administration’s records, saying, “I don’t know what’s true and what’s not.”

Last month, the National Archives and Records Administration recovered 15 boxes of White House documents from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. It was later reported that classified documents had been discovered among the boxes.

The Archives also said it had to repair and tape back together Trump White House documents that were ripped apart.

While speaking with host Bret Baier on Fox News’s “Special Report” on Monday, Rubio was asked why Republicans were not expressing the same degree of outrage they displayed when it was disclosed that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had used a private email server while working for the White House.

“Well, first of all, I don’t know what’s true and what’s not because they’ve made up so many stories about Donald Trump over the years that, I mean, things that I just knew were flat out untrue,” Rubio said.

The Florida senator, who is up for reelection in November, argued that the situation with Clinton’s emails was different because it was handled by the federal government and not disclosed by the media.

According to excerpts from an upcoming book written by New York Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman, White House staffers regularly found documents clogging the toilet in the White House residence during Trump’s time in office.

“Nowadays, in the mainstream media, you just need one source to smear Donald Trump, and maybe you don’t even need that. So it’s hard to tell anymore what really happened and what didn’t. The documents that were in Mar-a-Lago by all accounts were turned over,” Rubio said.

“Look, if the process wasn’t followed there, then that there needs to be something that happens about that. It’s not a crime, I don’t believe, but the stuff about flushing paper down the toilet — who knows if that’s even true?”

Rubio claimed to have seen “at least a dozen things” about Trump reported by the media as well as written in books written that he knew were false.

The storage of White House documents at Mar-a-Lago was a possible violation of the Presidential Records Act. The National Archives reportedly alerted the Department of Justice after discovering the possibly classified documents.