Documents with categorized markings had been found out in former US Vice President Mike Pence’s Indiana house closing week, in step with his legal professional.
“The additional records appear to be a small number of documents bearing classified markings that were inadvertently boxed and transported to the personal home of the former Vice President at the end of the last Administration,” Pence’s lawyer, Greg Jacob, told the National Archives in a letter last week.
Jacob said that “Pence was unaware of the existence of sensitive or classified documents at his personal residence”.
Additionally, the previous US VP “understands the top significance of defending delicate and categorized data and stands in a position and prepared to cooperate totally with the National Archives and any suitable inquiry,” Jacob stated.
A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment Tuesday, and a lawyer for Pence did not immediately respond to an email seeking further elaboration.
Pence told the Associated Press in August that he did not take any classified information with him when he left office.
Asked directly if he had retained any classified information upon leaving office, he said, “No, not to my knowledge.”
The findings come just a couple of weeks after an investigation into President Joe Biden and the discovery of classified documents in both his former office space and his home.
Earlier this month, White House spokesperson Karrine Jean-Pierre told reporters that the US president had no knowledge of them.
It is unclear precisely how many classified materials have been obtained from Biden’s office and home, with Richard Sauber, special counsel to the president, claiming it was “a small quantity”.
Roughly 300 paperwork with classification markings — together with some on the best secret degree — were recovered from former US President Donald Trump since he left place of work in January 2021.
In January 2022, the National Archives and Records Administration retrieved 15 bins of paperwork, telling Justice Department officers they contained “a lot” of categorized subject material.
In August, FBI brokers took about 33 bins and packing containers of eleven,000 paperwork from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago belongings, together with kind of 100 with classification markings present in a garage room and an place of work.