Congressman Michael McCaul (TX) invoked the “[Donald Trump] can declassify a document on a moment’s notice” excuse as he defended the former president’s possession of the classified documents the FBI confiscated during their search at Mar-a-Lago.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee Ranking Republican spoke with ABC News’ Martha Raddatz on Sunday, who noted how Trump railed against the Justice Department for the umpteenth time during his speech in Pennsylvania. Asked for his reaction, McCaul brought up the Russia investigation and the Steele dossier as he spoke to the “distrust” Republicans have for the FBI.

“It frankly saddens me because as an alumni of the DOJ, I hate to see people’s faith in our institutions being weakened,” McCaul said. Nonetheless, he skipped over Team Trump’s lies and resistance over the Mar-a-Lago documents in order to say “I have a lot of questions. Why didn’t they enforce the subpoena before they did this unprecedented search warrant on a former president of the United States? This will all come out factually as this case moves forward.”

Raddatz kept the conversation going by asking McCaul “do you see any reason that he should have taken those documents, those highly classified documents to Mar-a-Lago?”

His answer:

Well, look…I have lived in the classified world most of my professional career. I personally wouldn’t do that, but I’m not the president of the United States. He has a different set of rules that apply to him. The president can declassify a document on a moment’s notice, and we don’t have all the facts. I know they were taken out of the White House while he was president, and whether or not he declassified those documents remains to be seen.

Trump has already self-sabotaged his legal claim of declassifying the Mar-a-Lago documents, and Raddatz noted that former Attorney General Bill Barr just gave an interview where he torpedoed the premise of McFaul’s defense.

“I frankly am skeptical of this claim that ‘I declassified everything,’ you know, because, frankly, I think it’s highly improbable,” Barr told Fox News. “And second, if, in fact, he sort of stood over scores of boxes, not really knowing what was in them and said, I hereby declassify everything in here that would be such an abuse and that shows such recklessness that it’s almost worse than taking the documents.”

“There’s a process for declassification,” McFaul conceded, “but again, the president’s in a very different position than most of us in the national security space.” He continued by voicing skepticism for

Watch above, via ABC.

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