The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is carrying out this Friday a search of classified documents at the residence of former United States Vice President Mike Pence, in Indiana (USA), which has been agreed with him, they reported. local media.
According to the CNN television network, which quoted a spokesman for the politician, Pence is out of Indiana when visiting the west coast of the country with his family, after his daughter gave birth.
A lawyer for the former vice president is present at the house while the search is taking place.
In January, a Pence aide found dozens of documents marked classified at his Indiana home after the former vice president asked him to conduct a search.
The papers were discovered on January 16 and one of the former vice president’s lawyers, Greg Jacob, notified Congress and the National Archives, the institution that has custody of sensitive and classified documents.
As the lawyer explained to the National Archives, the documents were at Pence’s home in Indiana by mistake.
Specifically, a “small number” of classified documents would have been “packaged and transported” from the White House to the former vice president’s home without him noticing.
In fact, as the lawyer emphasized, Pence “was not aware of the existence of classified or sensitive documents in his personal residence.”
Pence, who stood by Trump for most of his Presidency (2017-2021), distanced himself from him after the 2021 assault on the Capitol and after being pressured by the president to annul Democrat Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 elections.
Media outlets revealed Thursday that the Justice Department subpoenaed Pence as part of special counsel Robert Hur’s investigation into Trump’s efforts to stay in power after the 2020 election that led to the assault on the Capitol
Pence is currently looming as a contender for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination and has published an autobiography titled “So help me God.”
According to the Fox network, Pence’s team decided to search the former vice president’s home in Indiana and his office at the conservative think tank “Advancing American Freedom” after the revelations about Biden.
This month, it was revealed that Biden’s team had found sensitive and classified documents from the time when he was vice president of Barack Obama (2009-2017) and when he was a senator (1973-2009).
The documents were discovered at Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware, and in his private office at the Penn Biden Center think tank in Washington.
The Biden government has tried to distance itself from the case of the classified documents found by the FBI at Trump’s mansion in Mar-a-Lago (Florida).
Biden’s documents were found by his own lawyers and turned over to authorities, unlike what happened at Mar-a-Lago, where intervention by the Justice Department was required to recover the papers.