Reaction comes after classified documents found at Pence’s Indiana home
INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — In an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press,” former Vice President and Indiana governor Mike Pence was asked about former President Donald Trump keeping classified documents at his home.
Pence told NBC’s Chuck Todd that “clearly possessing classified documents in an unprotected area is not proper. I’ve got to tell you I was on the Judiciary Committee for 10 years while in Congress. I know how the Justice Department works.”
Pence has described in detail how he dealt with highly classified information while serving as vice president. The documents were brought to the Vice President’s Residence and Office, he read them, and then the documents were destroyed.
U.S. Rep. Jim Banks, an Indiana Republican, said, “This could be a situation, as we are quickly learning in how these documents are stored when they leave the White House, when a president or vice president leaves the White House and where they go from there. I know a number of my colleagues are looking into legislation to clarify how classified documents are handled and stored in the White House and what is done at the end of presidential term when they are handed off.”
Pence has been critical of the Justice Department and Biden administration for essentially weaponizing parts of the government.
The U.S. government creates close to 50 million classified documents every year.
I-Team 8 asked Asaf Lupin of the Indiana University School of Law if the government is keeping too many secrets.
Lupin said, “The answer is 100% ‘yes.’ At any given moment, there are thousands of classifications happening within our federal government, and our government can’t keep track of it all. We have an overclassification problem in America, and the results are we are not declassifying quickly enough and we are not setting standards on what needs to be classified and in what ways, and the incentive structure for those that classify is to overclassify.”