Documents with classified markings were found last week at former Vice President Mike Pence’s home in Indiana, according to multiple reports.
Greg Jacob, an attorney for Pence, said in a letter to the National Archives that the discovery appeared to include “a small number of documents bearing classified markings that were inadvertently boxed and transported to the personal home of the former Vice President at the end of the last Administration,” according to The Associated Press.
“Pence was unaware of the existence of sensitive or classified documents at his personal residence,” Jacob said in the letter. He added that the former vice president “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 discovery was first reported by CNN.
Jacob said Pence hired an outside lawyer with experience handling classified records to review documents at his home after records were recently found at President Joe Biden’s home in Delaware, according to the AP and The New York Times.
It was not immediately clear what the classified documents contained or at what level they were classified. Jacob said the attorney reviewing Pence’s records stopped looking when it became clear they were looking at classified documents, the Times reported.
Last year, Pence told the AP that he did not take any classified records with him “to my knowledge” when he left office. In an interview earlier this month with Fox Business News, he described a “formal process” that he said he underwent daily to review classified documents while serving as Trump’s vice president.
“Before we left the White House the attorneys on my staff went through all the documents at both the White House and our offices there, and at the vice president’s residence to ensure that any documents that needed to be turned over the National Archives, including classified documents, were turned over,” Pence said in the interview. “So, we went through a very careful process.”
The recent discovery is the latest in a string of similar instances that have raised questions about how classified records are handled by officials. Attorney General Merrick Garland has appointed special counsels to investigate how Biden and former President Donald Trump handled classified documents after officials learned of documents found at a former office used by Biden in Washington and his home in Wilmington, and at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
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