Can everyone who does not have classified documents in their garage please step forward? Just everyone who worked at the White House and managed to walk out the door without multiple secret documents?

Bueller? Bueller?

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As CNN was first to report, former Vice President Mike Pence has joined the ranks of onetime executive branch officials making a phone call to the National Archives admitting that he may or may not have an STD — that’s a surreptitiously transported document. Awkward!

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The Washington Post published part of a January 18 letter from Pence’s lawyer Greg Jacob to NARA, explaining how Pence came to find the classified materials:

Following press reports of classified documents at the personal home of President Biden, out of an abundance of caution, on Monday, January 16, Vice President Pence engaged outside counsel, with experience in handling classified documents, to review records stored in his personal home. Counsel identified a small number of documents that could potentially contain sensitive or classified information interspersed throughout the records.

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Pence proactively hired outside counsel to go through four boxes of documents from his time in government service and immediately called NARA on January 18 upon discovering about a dozen documents with classified markings. Later that evening, agents from the FBI field office in Indianapolis knocked on the Pence family’s door in Carmel, Indiana, to take possession of the classified materials. The next day, staffers drove the boxes to DC so that the Archives could undertake a thorough search for any presidential records.

This is exactly what President Biden did after his attorneys found classified materials in his office at a Pennsylvania think tank, which is how he came to discover documents in his garage, much to the glee of congressional Republicans, who have demanded a full investigation.

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And it’s the same course of conduct advised by Trump’s attorney Chris Kise, the former Florida solicitor general, when Trump hired him in August. According to the Washington Post, Kise counseled Trump to go through everything he had, hand back what didn’t belong to him, and negotiate with the DOJ to avoid a criminal charge. Trump chose instead to listen to Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton, who is not a lawyer, but who convinced him that the president has the power to declassify documents with his mind and then stash them in his pool locker.

Although to be fair, by the time Kise joined the legal team, Trump had already stonewalled the Archives for months, refused to hand back the documents stored all over his country club home in Florida, even in defiance of a grand jury subpoena, submitted a false attestation from counsel that he had already given everything back, and finally forced the FBI to raid Mar-a-Lago. So, perhaps that ship had already sailed.

In the meantime, the Pence discovery and his interactions with NARA and the FBI will make it much more difficult for Trump’s defenders to pretend that there’s no difference in the way Biden and Trump handled classified documents. Will Pence now get his own special counsel to investigate, since Biden and Trump each have one? Or is he so far down in the polling for the Republican presidential primary that no one believes there could possibly be a conflict?

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Everything Trump touches …

Classified documents discovered at home of former VP Mike Pence [WaPo]
First on CNN: Classified documents found at Pence’s Indiana home [CNN]

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Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

Topics

Chris Kise, Donald Trump, Government, Joe Biden, Mike Pence, Tom Fitton