Classified Documents Found at Mike Pence’s Home in Indiana
Classified government documents were found at the home of former Vice President Mike Pence, CNN reported Tuesday.
Pence’s lawyers found about a dozen classified documents in his Indiana residence last week and immediately alerted the FBI. The discovery is a direct contradiction of Pence’s insistence that he had never taken government records.
When asked in a CNN interview last November if he took classified documents from the White House, Pence responded, “I did not,” while conflictingly nodding his head.
The discovery also comes after multiple batches of classified documents were found in President Joe Biden’s Delaware home and former private office. It is actually oddly easy to take such documents by mistake at higher levels of government, where officials are allowed to keep copies of records, according to Larry Pfeiffer, a former CIA officer who ran the White House situation room under President Barack Obama.
“There’s this level of human frailty here that just plays into this situation,” Pfeiffer told NPR on January 19, after the second batch of Biden documents was found. “I’ve known several people who have retired, and after they retire, they’re going through their box, and it’s like, whoa, how did that get in here?”
Pfeiffer noted that those discoveries are not treated as very big deals. Biden, former President Donald Trump, and now Pence are all under such intense scrutiny because they are either sitting or recent leaders, which is a situation we have not seen before.
Pence also criticized Biden for keeping classified documents, calling out what he considered a “double standard” between the way Biden and Trump have been treated. “It’s just incredibly frustrating to me,” Pence said on the conservative Hugh Hewitt Show, slamming the FBI for “massive overreach.”
In the same CNN interview where he denied taking classified documents, Pence said he saw “no reason to have” such records.
There are huge differences between Biden and Trump, though. Biden, and even Pence, found relatively few documents, immediately alerted the proper authorities, and appear to be cooperating with the investigations into how the classified information ended up there.
Trump, on the other hand, hoarded hundreds of documents and refused to cooperate, resulting in the FBI raiding his Mar-a-Lago estate.