The FBI Friday found at least one more classified document at former Vice President Mike Pence’s Indiana home after agents were invited to conduct a day-long search.
“The Department of Justice completed a thorough and unrestricted search of five hours and removed one document with classified markings and six additional pages,” said Devin O’Malley, a Pence spokesman.
Police in suburban Carmel blocked access to Pence’s home as agents carried out the meticulous search.
The former vice president and potential 2024 White House candidate was visiting family in California after the birth of a grandchild.
The FBI had already taken possession of what Pence’s lawyer described to the National Archives as a “small number of documents” that were “inadvertently boxed and transported” to Pence’s Indiana home at the end of the Trump administration.
The boxes came mostly from Pence’s Naval Observatory vice presidential residence, while other classified material came from a West Wing office drawer.
Pence has said he was unaware the documents were at his home and apologized.
His lawyers immediately notified authorities and voluntarily asked the FBI to conduct its own more extensive search.
The findings at Pence’s home mirror the discovery of at least three small sets of documents with classification markings at President Biden’s home in Delaware and his former Washington office.
Like Pence, Biden has cooperated with the probe and invited the FBI to do its own searches, including one of his Delaware beach home.
Both cases are very different from that of former President Donald Trump, who intentionally took hundreds of classified documents with him when he left the White House.
Trump, who says the government documents belong to him, resisted repeated demands for their return and even defied a subpoena. Prosecutors had to get a federal judge to authorize a search of his Mar-a-Lago resort home, which turned up more than 300 classified documents.
Officials are also trying to determine whether Trump or his acolytes criminally obstructed the probe into the mishandled documents.