The series of classified documents welcomes a new protagonist. A dozen notes were found on January 16 in Carmel (Indiana) at the home of Mike Pence, former vice-president of Donald Trump (2017-2021), we learned on Tuesday January 24. According to lawyer Greg Jacob, who was one of the Republican’s closest advisers, Mike Pence asked another lawyer to check his personal files, after the recent revelations of the same nature which embarrassed Joe Biden .
The documents discovered – of which we do not know the degree of classification or the content – were placed in a safe. They would have been “inadvertently packaged and transported”, according to Greg Jacob, during the chaotic move organized between the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol and the entry of Joe Biden into the White House, two weeks later. Greg Jacob promptly wrote to the National Archives to inform them of this news.
The Ministry of Justice decided to dispatch agents of the federal police (FBI), on January 19, to take possession of the two boxes containing the documents. That day, Mike Pence was in Washington to participate in the march of opponents of the right to abortion. As Joe Biden had done, the former vice-president wanted to show respect for the rules and impeccable cooperation with the authorities.
Their reaction, on a procedural level, appears in total contrast to the attitude of Donald Trump, who had knowingly taken away hundreds of documents after his departure from the White House and then had withdrawn them from the National Archives, which claimed them, refusing to release them. turn it over to the FBI. Hence the police search at Mar-a-Lago, in August 2022, and the discovery of a very large number of notes, some of which had the highest possible classification.
“Maybe we overclassify some things? »
Nevertheless, this new episode reinforces the questions about generalized negligence in the entourage of former senior officials of the American executive. It also raises the question of the classification standards used and their dissemination. “Maybe we overclassify some things? That could be part of the problem.”noted Republican Senator Lindsey Graham (South Carolina) on Fox News.
Michael Turner (Ohio), Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, announced that he would ask the intelligence services to carry out an assessment of the documents seized from Mike Pence, as he had done for those found in Joe Biden’s think tank as well as in his Delaware residence. His colleague James Comer (Kentucky), who chairs the control commission, underlined for his part “the sharp contrast” between the willingness to cooperate displayed by Mike Pence and the withholding of information by the White House.
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