Classified documents are found in Mike Pence’s home

About a dozen documents marked as classified have been found in former Vice President Mike Pence‘s home in Indiana, according to a new report on Tuesday.

Pence’s lawyer discovered the material last week and turned it over to the FBI, CNN reported. 

The FBI and the Justice Department are investigating.

The documents were discovered in Pence’s home in Carmel, Indiana, after the former vice president repeatedly said he didn’t have any classified material in his possession. 

‘I did not,’ he told ABC News in November when asked if he took any classified documents with him when he left the Trump administration. 

This was shortly after Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago mansion was raided by FBI agents who were seeking classified material from his administration.

‘​Well, there’d be no reason to have classified documents, particularly if they were in an unprotected area,’ Pence said at the time. ‘But I will tell you that I believe there had to be many better ways to resolve that issue than executing a search warrant at the personal residence of a former president of the United States.’ 

The discovery of documents in Pence’s possession comes after he criticized President Joe Biden for having classified material.

Pence called it ‘troubling’ and accused federal agencies of having a ‘double standard’ when it came to handling Biden’s situation and Trump’s possession of classified documents.

He told Howard Hewitt a few weeks ago that the FBI was guilty of a ‘massive overreach’ in its raid on Trump’s home.

“But having now created that standard and now abandoned that standard when the current president of the United States is found to have had classified documents in his possession after leaving office, I have no words right now,” he said, comparing their treatment between Trump and Biden.

The National Archives had requested material from Trump. All presidents turn over the documents to the federal government at the end of their tenure. Trump eventually handed over 15 boxes. The archives found classified material in them and, suspecting Trump hadn’t handed everything over, turned to the Justice Department, which ultimately got a federal warrant to search the property.

Biden turned over his documents when his lawyers found them and voluntarily gave the FBI access to his Wilmington, Delaware, home, to search for more. Those agents found six more classified documents on Friday after a 13-hour search of the home.  

Ultimately, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to look into each matter. 

Earlier this month Pence described to Fox Business how classified materials were handled when he was vice president.

‘Early in the morning, I received a presidential daily brief at the vice president’s residence,’ he said.

‘I’d rise early. I’d go to the safe where my military aide would place those classified materials. I’d pull them out, review them. I’d receive a presentation (on) them and then, frankly, more often than not…I would simply return them back to the file that I’d received them in. They went in commonly into what was called a burn bag that my military aide would gather and then destroy those classified materials—same goes in materials that I would receive at the White House.’

He went on to add: ‘The handling of classified materials and the nation’s secret is a very serious matter and as a former vice president of the United States, I can speak from personal experience about the attention that ought to be paid to those materials when you’re in office and after you leave office. And clearly that did not take place in this case.’