Justice Department clears Pence for confidential documents he had at home | International

The Justice Department has dropped its investigation into confidential documents that were improperly taken to his home after Mike Pence, a vice president during Donald Trump’s tenure as president, left office. The prosecution informed Pence of the dismissal of the investigation with a letter dated June 1 in which it assures that no charges will be filed.

It emerged in late January that aides to Donald Trump’s former vice president discovered a dozen documents with marks classified as classified in his Indiana home. Pence thus joined former President Donald Trump and current President Joe Biden, who also improperly brought confidential documents into their private homes.

In Pence’s case, it consisted of “a small number of classified documents that were inadvertently boxed up and transported to the former vice president’s personal home at the end of the last administration,” Pence’s attorney wrote in a dated letter sent to state officials. national archives, the institution that must keep records and records when the presidents and vice-presidents leave their offices.

In February, FBI agents searched Pence’s Indiana home for hours and found a document with classification marks and six additional pages without classification marks that had not been discovered in the initial review.

From the beginning, Pence cooperated with the investigation, as did Joe Biden and unlike Donald Trump, who ignored requests from the authorities to hand over the secret documents until the FBI seized them in the registry of his private club in Mar-A-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida. US media reported on Friday that after receiving such a request, Trump and his lawyers did not hand over the document on a secret plan to attack Iran that the former president spoke about in a tape.

The Attorney General, Merrick Garland, decided in Pence’s case not to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the case, unlike in the cases of Trump and Biden. There was never any indication that Pence intentionally withheld those documents or even knew they were in his home, so there was never any expectation that he would face charges. Pence had made sure in a very recent interview with Fox News that he had been “very careful” not to take anything improper from the White House or his own offices.

News of his investigative file comes days before Pence launches his campaign for the Republican nomination for president in Iowa on Wednesday, a race that will put him in direct competition with his former boss, former President Donald Trump. Pence will formalize his candidacy with the broadcast of a video and with an electoral act in Des Moines, the state’s capital and most populous city, with about 210,000 inhabitants.

The former vice president, a traditional conservative, has a difficult position in the Republican Party, where he has become one of the most hated characters by Donald Trump’s staunchest supporters for his refusal to subvert the result of the 2020 presidential election, in which the former president had been defeated by Democrat Joe Biden. The crowd chanted “we hang Mike Pence” as they made their way into the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. In a forum with Trump supporters broadcast on Fox News this week, the mere mention of his name drew boos from aides.

Pence had to testify before a grand jury investigating Trump. She appealed to prevent it, but lost. However, he managed to avoid testifying specifically about his actions on the day of the storming of the Capitol. He said that on Jan. 6 he was exercising his role as Senate president and forcing him to testify violated the so-called “expression or debate clause” that protects members of Congress from being accountable for their parliamentary actions.

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