The FBI (American federal police) is carrying out this Friday (10) a search for classified documents at the residence of former Vice President of the United States Mike Pence in Indiana, which was previously consensual, according to local press reports.
According to television station CNN, which quoted a spokesman for the politician, Pence is out of Indiana to be visiting the west coast of the country with his family, after the birth of his daughter. A lawyer for the former vice president is present at the house during the searches.
In January, a Pence aide found dozens of documents marked classified at his Indiana home after the former vice president asked him to search them.
The papers were discovered on January 16 and one of the former vice president’s lawyers, Greg Jacob, notified Congress and the National Archives, an institution that keeps secret and confidential documents.
As the attorney explained to the National Archives, the documents were at Pence’s Indiana home 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 his realizing it.
In fact, as the lawyer emphasized, Pence “was not aware of the existence of classified or confidential documents in his personal residence”.
Pence, who was by Trump’s side for most of his presidency (2017-2021), distanced himself after the 2021 invasion of the Capitol and after being pressured by the president not to certify the victory of Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 elections.
Media outlets revealed on Thursday that the Justice Department subpoenaed Pence as part of Special Counsel Robert Hur’s investigation into Trump’s alleged efforts to stay in power after the 2020 election.
Pence has been tipped as a candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination and recently published an autobiography.
According to broadcaster Fox, 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 following the revelations about Biden.
This month, it was revealed that Biden’s team had found classified and classified documents from his time as vice president under 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 tried to distance itself from the case of the classified documents found by the FBI at Trump’s mansion in Mar-a-Lago (Florida), claiming that the current president’s documents were found by the lawyers themselves and handed over to the authorities.
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