Washington (EFE).- Mike Pence, who was vice president of the United States during the Government of Donald Trump (2017-2021), found classified documents at his residence in the state of Indiana, local media reported on Tuesday.
Pence discovered those documents on January 16 and one of his lawyers, Greg Jacob, notified Congress and the National Archives, the institution that has custody of sensitive and classified documents.
As Pence’s lawyer explained to the National Archives, the documents were at the former vice president’s home in Indiana by mistake.
Specifically, a “small number” of classified documents were “packaged and transported” from the White House to the former vice president’s home without his knowledge.
In fact, as the lawyer emphasized, Pence “was not aware of the existence of classified or sensitive documents in his personal residence.”
Pence away from Trump
Pence, who stood by Trump for most of his Presidency, 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.
Now Pence is emerging as a contender for the 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.
Controversy replicated from Trump and 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 the authorities, unlike what happened at Mar-a-Lago, where the intervention of the Justice Department was necessary to recover the papers.