Classified documents found at Mike Pence's home in Indiana
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- Documents marked as classified were discovered at former Vice President Mike Pence's Indiana home.
- A lawyer for Pence found the documents and handed them over to the FBI, according to CNN.
- Documents marked as classified were recently recovered at President Joe Biden's Delaware home.
Around a dozen documents marked as classified were found at former Vice President Mike Pence's home in Indiana, CNN reported Tuesday.
A lawyer for Pence discovered the records at Pence's home in Carmel, Indiana, and turned them over to the FBI, multiple sources told CNN.
The FBI is looking into the documents and reviewing how they got to Pence's home. Pence discovered two boxes that included classified records and four boxes that contained potential presidential records but believed they were courtesy copies of documents the National Archives already possessed, according to Politico. He sent the six boxes to NARA on Monday, Politico reported.
Pence is the third potential 2024 frontrunner to be caught in a classified-document mishap. The FBI executed a search warrant last summer at former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate and recovered roughly 100 documents that were marked classified.
And it surfaced this month that US officials and President Joe Biden's lawyers uncovered classified documents from his time as vice president at his home and former office. The Justice Department is currently investigating Trump and Biden's handling of national security information.
'Is it part of a systemic failure?'
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle were floored by the Pence revelations.
"I don't understand this," Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin told CNN's Manu Raju. "The standards that we apply here are so different in terms of our access to these documents and what we can do with them. I just can't t explain it. If it's a shabby staff work, so be it. But ultimately, the elected officials have to be held responsible."
"Sounds like it's proliferating. I don't get it," Texas Sen. John Cornyn told CNN. "Anybody that deals with classified materials knows they have to be maintained in a secure place and not be available to our adversaries by putting them into a place that's easily penetrated. So, it's not good."
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence ranking member Marco Rubio said it's nearly impossible for he or any of his colleagues to take anything out of the secure reading rooms where they review classified information shared by the administration.
"You can't take it out of that space unless you have a staffer who has to carry it in a pouch. And unless someone deliberately decides, 'I'm gonna take this document home with me,' — I don't know how you do that in Congress," Rubio told Insider at the US Capitol on Tuesday.
While he said he's obviously troubled by media reports that some of the Biden-related documents date back to his time in the Senate, Rubio's become even more alarmed by administration officials' reluctance to bring congressional Republicans up to speed on the Biden case or the Trump-related search at Mar-a-Lago.
"I don't need to know about their criminal investigations. But we need to know, on the administrative side, about what threat did this pose?" Rubio said. "Is it part of a systemic failure that needs to be addressed?"
Fellow Intelligence panelist Sen. Angus King said keeping a closer eye on sensitive materials as White House officials wrap up their service would be a step in the right direction.
"I think procedures need to be established in the executive branch to restrict the movement of these documents. And to examine whatever documents are going to be kept at the end of their term," the Independent from Maine told Insider.
Rather than unload on Pence, Sen. Ron Wyden directed his fire at what he sees as antiquated rules.
"The classification system is now such a mess, it is harming national security," the Oregon Democrat and Intelligence member told reporters in the Senate subway. Wyden, who noted that he and Republican Sen. Jerry Moran of Kansas have been advocating for an overhaul of declassification standards since 2020, said he remains hopeful that current Director of National Security Avril Haines will follow through on the languishing issue.
"They're getting to the point, in my view, where they're going to have difficulty classifying what needs to be classified, and they're going to be over classifying stuff that shouldn't be classified," Wyden warned.