The FBI was searching former Vice President Mike Pence’s Indiana home Friday, looking for any classified documents that might be in the house, a senior law-enforcement official told NBC News.
The move comes weeks after Pence reported finding a “small number” of classified documents in his Carmel, Indiana house, and a day after it was revealed he’d been subpoenaed in a separate federal probe — the special counsel’s investigation into former President Donald Trump’s effort to stay in office after the 2020 election and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
The classified documents were found following the discovery of Obama-era classified documents in the possession of former Vice President Joe Biden, and also after the FBI executed a search warrant at Trump’s home after his lawyers claimed he’d returned all documents with classified markings from the White House.
More than 100 such documents were found during the August search of Mar-a-Lago, Justice Department officials said in court filings.
In a letter to the National Archives last month, Pence’s lawyer Greg Jacob said they’d found a “small number” of classified documents at Pence’s home after Pence asked “outside counsel” to look for documents in the wake of such papers being found in Biden’s Delaware home.
Jacob said the documents had been “inadvertently boxed and transported” to Pence’s home at the end of the Trump administration and that the former vice president “was unaware of the existence of sensitive or classified documents at his personal residence.”
Pence’s team “immediately” secured the classified documents in a locked safe after their Jan. 16 discovery, and FBI agents came to Pence’s home to retrieve the documents a few days later, the letter said.
“Vice President Pence 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,” he said.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
