Former Vice President Pence said he would not mind lawmakers having access to the classified documents that were found at his Indiana home earlier this year, as a bipartisan group of senators have lobbied federal investigators to let them review the material.
“I would have no objection whatsoever to (Sen. Mark Warner) seeing the documents,” Pence said in an interview with Newsmax on Tuesday. “I’d be very happy to cooperate with any further inquiry from members of the Senate.”
Warner, a Virginia Democrat, and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) have led a push to get federal investigators to allow members of the Senate Intelligence Committee to review the classified documents taken from Pence, former President Trump and President Biden from his time as vice president.
The mishandling of documents by Trump and Biden are at the center of federal investigations. Pence handed over documents to the Department of Justice (DOJ), and federal agents searched areas where they thought more documents could be located but found no others.
Thus far the DOJ has refused requests from lawmakers to see the documents, claiming the move might interfere with the federal investigations. Warner earlier this week blasted the decision, saying the department’s stance “does not pass the smell test.”
“The administration’s position does not pass the smell test,” Warner said on CBS on Sunday. “We’ve got a job not to go into the legal ramifications, but to make sure that the intelligence community has done what’s right.”
Rubio said last month that he did not understand the reasoning that congressional oversight of the documents would hinder an investigation.
“I don’t know how congressional oversight on the documents … in any way impedes an investigation,” Rubio said in a joint interview with Warner on CBS. “These are probably materials already have access to, we just don’t know which ones they are.”
Pence said members of the Senate Intelligence Committee “deal with classified documents on a regular basis.”
Pence defended his handling of the documents, saying they were “inadvertently packed.”
“The materials that were inadvertently packed and stored at my residence we discovered earlier this year,” Pence said. “Out of an abundance of caution, we engaged in a review. We turned those over to the FBI immediately.”
