CARMEL, Ind. — Classified documents were found at the home of former Indiana governor and Vice-President Mike Pence this week.
The FBI and the Justice Department’s National Security Division have launched a review of the documents and how they ended up in Pence’s house in Carmel. Pence moved to Carmel after leaving Washington in 2021 after his and President Trump’s term ended.
In a statement, Pence’s attorney, Greg Jacob, says that did not know the documents were in his possession.
“Vice President Pence was unaware of the existence of sensitive or classified documents at his personal residence,” Jacob wrote. “Vice President Pence understands the high importance of protecting sensitive and classified information and stands ready and willing to cooperate fully with the National Archives and any appropriate inquiry.”
The documents are said to have been stored in taped-up boxes in an “unsecured” area of his home. Pence is said to have asked his lawyers to sift through the boxes to look for any documents out of an abundance of caution given the recent discoveries of documents at the home of President Biden and Delaware as well as the documents found at President Trump’s home in Florida.
Back in November, before the documents were found at Biden’s home, Pence told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that “possessing classified documents in an unsecured area is not proper.”
“This could be a situation, as we’re quickly learning, in how these documents are stored, when they leave the White House … and where they go from there,” said Indiana Congressman Jim Banks on WISH-TV. “I know that a number of my colleagues are looking into legislation to clarify how classified documents are handled.”
With now three current and former U.S. dignitaries having been found with classified material in the last few months, IU law professor Asaf Lupin believes that the federal government has a “classification problem.”
“At any given moment there are thousands of classifications happening within our federal government and our government just can’t keep track of it all,” Lupin said. “We have an over-classification problem in America and the result of that is that we are not declassifying quickly enough and we are not setting standards on what needs to be classified.”
House Oversight Chairman James Comer, a Kentucky Republican investigating the documents found at Biden’s home says Pence reached out to him after the documents were found at his home.
“He has agreed to fully cooperate with congressional oversight and any questions we have about the matter,” said Comer.
