The FBI was searching the home of former Vice President Mike Pence in Indiana on Friday looking for classified documents that may be in the house, a senior law enforcement official told NBC News.
The move comes weeks after Pence reported finding a “small number” of classified documents at his home in Carmel and a day after it was revealed that he had been subpoenaed in a separate federal investigation: the special counsel’s investigation into the former President Donald Trump’s effort to stay. in office after the 2020 election and his role in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
The Friday search date was negotiated between Pence’s team and the Justice Department, the official said.
A Justice Department official said the search was a “consent” search agreed to by the department and Pence’s lawyers, and no search warrants were issued in advance. All the ground rules for the search were stipulated during negotiations between the Justice Department and Pence’s team, the official said.
The classified documents were found at Pence’s home last month. after the discovery of classified Obama-era documents in the possession of former Vice President Joe Biden, and also after an FBI search of Trump’s home after his lawyers claimed he had returned all documents with classified White House markings .
More than 100 of those documents were found during the August search in Mar-a-Lago, Justice Department officials said in court documents.
In a letter to the National Archives last month, Pence’s attorney, Greg Jacob, said they had found a “small number” of classified documents in the former vice president’s home after Pence asked “outside counsel” to search documents as a result of said documents. being found at Biden’s Delaware home.
Jacob said the documents had been “inadvertently packaged 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 any confidential or classified documents at his personal residence.”
Pence’s team “immediately” secured the classified documents in a locked safe after their discovery on January 16, and FBI agents arrived at Pence’s home to retrieve the documents a few days later, the letter said.
“Vice President Pence understands the great importance of protecting confidential and classified information and stands ready and willing to fully cooperate with the National Archives and any appropriate investigation,” he said.
Separately, a source familiar with the matter confirmed to NBC News on Thursday that Pence had been subpoenaed by special counsel Jack Smith, who is overseeing investigations into the Jan. 6 case and Trump’s classified documents.
The source said the subpoena related to January 6 and not to the document investigation. Spokesmen for Smith and Pence declined to comment.
