Here’s the difference between Biden and Pence document discovery

There is a big difference between the ongoing discovery of classified documents held by President Joe Biden and documents linked to Mike Pence. “Qualitatively they are very different,” says former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.

On January 16, Pence’s lawyers announced that a “small number of documents” marked “secret” were found in his Indiana home. They were “inadvertently packaged and moved” to Pence’s residence at the end of the Trump-Pence administration, lawyer Greg Jacob said in a letter to the National Archives and Records Administration.

Gingrich draws a line separating Pence’s files from those found with Biden, noting that the former vice president began the search on his own initiative after a series of classified materials were discovered in Biden’s private office and home.

“Obviously, people became very casual about documents that were classified,” he said in an interview. But unlike Biden, who withheld news of the discovery from the public for months until January, Pence asked his lawyers to look through and search for potential documents and handed over what they found “promptly,” Gingrich said.

“So I don’t think anyone is going to suggest the level of confusion that we had with both Mar-a-Largo and President Biden.”

Pence had previously denied keeping any classified material when he left office, both after the FBI raided former President Donald Trump’s Florida resort over his handling of classified information and earlier this month after how the White House acknowledged the discovery of classified records at the University of Pennsylvania. Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington DC.

“Our staff reviewed all materials in our office and our residence to ensure that there were no classified materials that left the White House or remained in our possession,” Pence told CBS on Jan. 10. His lawyer said the subsequent discovery of more files in Biden’s home prompted a closer scrutiny.

In the case of Biden, the classified documents were first discovered on November 2 at the Biden Center in Pennsylvania, where Biden had a personal office after his tenure as vice president under the Obama administration. Subsequent searches uncovered new documents on December 20 in the garage of Biden’s Wilmington home, and again in the same home on January 11, 12, and 20.

Jacob said that Pence “was not aware of the existence of confidential or classified documents in his personal home” prior to the search, but hired an outside lawyer to review the records stored in his Indiana home “out of great caution.” According to the lawyer, during the search, two boxes of classified records and two additional boxes with “courtesy copies of the vice president’s documents” were found.

Republican reaction was mixed.

Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio), who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, said he plans to conduct an intelligence audit and damage assessment to identify national security concerns. Trump, on the other hand, has defended Pence, saying he is an “innocent man” who has “never done anything knowingly dishonest in his life.”

Pence “did the right thing,” according to Gingrich, who believes the spotlight will eventually return to Biden.

As vice president in 2012, Biden donated a collection of photographs, documents, videotapes and files “enough to fill 1,875 boxes” to the University of Delaware, which said they would be released to the public after “December 31, 2019 or two.” years after the donor has retired from public life”, whichever is later.

Gingrich pointed to questions about the documents, tens of millions of dollars of Chinese funding for the University of Pennsylvania over the past few years, and a possible connection to the president’s son Hunter Biden, who handled foreign business affairs when Biden was vice president. the president.

“I think Biden will find that it just keeps growing and that it is very, very qualitatively different from Mike Pence,” he said.

The Penn-Biden Center claims it has “never requested or received any gifts from any Chinese or other foreign organization”, but Gingrich said he would be skeptical if he did not see the funding source for both universities.

“The Biden team was very secretive,” he said. “I find it amazing that they can have these multi-million dollar relationships at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Delaware, and they are never forced to tell people where the money comes from, who got it, etc. I mean, this is just an amazing level of trading influence.”

There are many questions that Gingrich wants answered regarding the release of the classified files. Without breaking secrecy, the public should at least be informed about the nature of the documents, “whether or not they are related to something the Chinese Communists want to see,” and “why it might have been worth taking them,” he said. with myself”. out.”

– Telegraph services

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texasstandard.news contributed to this report.

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