The FBI searched the Indiana home of former Vice President Mike Pence on Friday as part of a federal investigation into classified records.
Pence is the latest in a string of top US officials in possession of sensitive records after leaving the White House, including former President Donald Trump and now President Joe Biden.
Pence and his aides have said they were unaware the documents were at his home and have fully cooperated with authorities.
The FBI had already taken possession of what Pence’s lawyer earlier described as a “small number of documents” that had been “inadvertently packaged and transported” to Pence’s Indiana home at the end of the Trump administration.
On Friday afternoon, police were blocking the highway on the outskirts of Pence’s neighborhood of Carmel, Indiana, north of Indianapolis.
The search was described as consensual after an exchange between Pence’s legal team and the FBI. A member of Pence’s legal team was at the home and expected the search to last several hours.
The department has also been investigating the discovery of documents with classification marks at Biden’s home in Delaware and his former office in Washington, as well as at Trump’s Florida property. Authorities are trying to determine whether Trump or someone on his team criminally obstructed the investigation by refusing to turn over the documents before the FBI seized them.
Classified documents found in former Vice President Mike Pence’s home
Pence’s case is very different from Trump’s. Pence, according to his attorney Greg Jacob, requested a review by his attorneys of records stored at his home “out of an abundance of caution” during the uproar over the discovery of classified documents at Biden’s home and former private office. . When the Pence documents were discovered, Jacob said, they were kept in a locked safe and reported to the National Archives. FBI agents then collected the documents.
The material found in the boxes came primarily from Pence’s Naval Observatory vice-presidential residence, while other material came from a drawer in the West Wing office.
“Let me be clear: Those classified documents should not have been in my personal residence,” Pence said recently at Florida International University. “Mistakes were made and I take full responsibility.”
“We acted above politics and put national interests first,” he said.
The National Archives last month asked former US presidents and vice presidents to check their personal records for classified documents.
The Presidential Records Act states that all records created or received by the president while in office are the property of the United States government and will be managed by the Archives at the end of an administration.
