Federal law enforcement officials found more classified material at the Indiana home of former Vice President Mike Pence on Friday while they were conducting a search of the property that they had coordinated with Pence’s team.
An adviser to Pence said that the FBI found one classified document and six additional non-classified documents.
“Following the discovery and disclosure of a small number of potentially classified documents that had inadvertently been transported to his home in Indiana, Vice President Pence and his legal team have fully cooperated with the appropriate authorities and agreed to a consensual search of his residence that took place today,” Pence adviser Devin O’Malley said. “The Department of Justice completed a thorough and unrestricted search of five hours and removed one document with classified markings and six additional pages without such markings that were not discovered in the initial review by the vice president’s counsel.”
O’Malley added that Pence has instructed his legal team to continue cooperating with investigators and to be “fully transparent through the conclusion of this matter.”
Pence directed his team last month to search his home in Indiana and his office at his political advocacy group, Advancing American Freedom (AAF), following revelations that classified documents had been discovered in Biden’s office at the Penn Biden Center, a Washington think tank affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania. No classified papers turned up in the search of Pence’s offices at AAF.
The former vice president informed the National Archives of the discovery of classified government documents at his home in January, and the National Archives then informed the FBI about the discovery. The FBI later collected the material found at Pence’s home.
Pence was recently subpoenaed by special counsel Jack Smith in his criminal investigations into the classified documents found at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and the investigation related to alleged efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
ABC News reported on Thursday that the subpoena comes after “months of negotiations between federal prosecutors and Pence’s legal team.” The New York Times subsequently reported that the subpoena is related to Trump’s effort to stay in office after he lost the 2020 presidential election.
The Justice Department also has an active criminal investigation into President Joe Biden over his handling of classified material.
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