King: ‘I never heard of somebody being charged for touching someone on the arm’

Rep. Pete King (R-N.Y.) is standing up for Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump’s campaign manager, after Corey Lewandowski was charged with simple battery for allegedly grabbing the arm of a reporter.

{mosads}“I haven’t practiced law in a while, but I never heard of somebody being charged for touching someone on the arm, unless you’re talking about some kind of a sexual thing,” King said on the “Imus in the Morning” show.

King added that he thinks Trump is going to try to get “the high ground on the issue,” saying what happened was “exaggerated.” 

“Listen, I’m not saying he did the right thing,” he said, as first reported by BuzzFeed News, referring to Lewandowski’s actions. “I’m just saying, I think Trump benefits from the fact that it was so exaggerated.”

Lewandowski was charged with simple battery over the incident for “intentionally” touching former Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields and holding her back.

King said that before he saw video of the incident, he thought Lewandowski “had hit her with a baseball bat or something.”

After the incident, Fields tweeted a picture showing bruises on her arm.

King said if someone is in the “middle of a political scrum, those things happen.”

“You bump into people. Reporters put their arms in trying to get interviews, sticking a tape recorder in the guy’s face and pushing people out of the way. When she was on television describing it afterwards, I think she said it was the worst moment in her life, and how terrible it was,” he said.

“I’d be embarrassed to even talk about it.”

King also said people are now looking at the video released and saying “it’s not that bad.”

“If they had said early on, ‘He shouldn’t have touched her,’ that’s one thing. But the way they described it, as being some kind of brutal assault and battery and she was in fear of her life and you look at it and say, ‘It’s not that big of a deal.'”

King has not yet endorsed a candidate in the Republican primary.

Trump is backing his campaign manager, calling Lewandowski an “honorable guy” and a “decent man.”