The FBI is expected to search former Vice President Mike Pence’s Indiana home for classified documents in a matter of days, three law enforcement officials told NBC News.
The planned search was first reported by The Wall Street Journal last week.
In a letter to the National Archives last month, Pence’s counsel said a “small number” of classified documents were found at the Indiana residence on Jan. 16. The lawyer, Greg Jacob, said the documents turned up after Pence asked “outside counsel” to look for documents marked as classified, following the discovery of classified records at President Joe Biden’s Delaware home in Wilmington, Delaware.
Jacob said the documents were “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.”
The FBI searched Biden’s house in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, last week. No classified documents were found during the FBI’s search, Biden’s personal lawyer, Bob Bauer, said.
“Consistent with the process in Wilmington, the DOJ took for further review some materials and handwritten notes that appear to relate to his time as vice president,” Bauer said in a statement Wednesday.
The FBI previously searched the offices of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in mid-November after classified documents were discovered there on Nov. 2, NBC News reported last week.
Attorney General Merrick Garland on Jan. 12 appointed Robert Hur as special counsel to review Obama-era classified material found in Biden’s Delaware residence and the Penn Biden Center. House Republicans have also launched investigations into the matter.
The discovery of documents at Biden and Pence’s homes comes amid the DOJ’s investigation of former President Donald Trump after classified documents were found at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. FBI agents executed a search at Trump’s Florida estate in August and found more than 100 classified documents, including some marked top secret. In December, two more documents with classified markings were found at a Florida storage facility not far from Mar-a-Lago and turned over to the FBI.
