The nature of the classified document revelation at the home of former Vice President Mike Pence is “very different qualitatively” when compared to the documents connected to President Joe Biden, according to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
Lawyers for Pence found a “small number of documents” marked classified in his Indiana home on Jan. 16 that were “inadvertently boxed and transported” to Pence’s residence at the end of the Trump-Pence administration, one attorney, Greg Jacob, told the National Archives and Records Administration in a letter.
Gingrich, a contributor to The Epoch Times, tried to draw a line differentiating the Pence files to those found with Biden, noting that the former vice president had started the search on his own initiative following the series of classified material discoveries in Biden’s private office and home.
“Obviously, people have gotten very sloppy about documents that were secret,” he said in an interview. But unlike Biden, who kept the news of the finding from the public for months until January, Pence asked his lawyers to go through and look for potential documents and “promptly” turned over what they found, Gingrich said.
“So I don’t think anybody’s going to suggest the level of confusion we had both with Mar-a-Largo and with President Biden.”
Pence had previously denied having retained any classified materials when he left office—both after the FBI raided former President Donald Trump’s Florida resort over his handling of classified information and earlier this month after the White House acknowledged the finding of classified records at the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington.
“Our staff reviewed all of the materials in our office and in our residence to ensure that there were no classified materials that left the White House or remained in our possession,” Pence told CBS on Jan. 10. His lawyer said the subsequent discovery of more files at Biden’s home prompted a more thorough review.
By Eva Fu
