After former US Vice President Mike Pence became the third US leader in recent months to have classified documents found in their personal possession after leaving office, many in Congress have started demanding greater scrutiny of the ways documents are handled - and called on other past leaders to double-check their files.
Earlier this week, US media reported that a dozen classified documents had been found at Pence’s home in Indiana. The files were reportedly used to brief him for foreign trips and were of a low level of classification, but the FBI is nonetheless investigating the situation.
That news came after several batches of classified files were found in the family home and former professorial offices of US President Joe Biden in recent weeks, and after the FBI raided former US President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate last August, seizing hundreds of classified files.
The news about Pence caused the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) on Thursday to contact all living former presidents and vice presidents, asking them to verify if they still have classified files in their possession. It’s common for former US leaders to set up libraries for scholarly studies of their presidency, but also for them to keep files in their personal possession from that time.
Those people include former presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter, and former vice presidents Dick Cheney, Al Gore, and Dan Quayle.
The situation has ruffled the feathers of Congress, which commonly handles classified files and works in conjunction with the White House to make leadership decisions based on classified information.
US Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) denounced the situation as “an epidemic” of document mishandling, telling US media that “we have to say categorically, whether it’s Republican or Democrat, it’s all wrong. It shows carelessness, negligence, and I think Americans should be mad. That’s why it has to be researched and investigated.”
Many observers and experts have said they don’t see the mishandling of documents as deliberate and suggested the problem lay in how files are sorted when presidents leave the White House. The Presidential Records Act requires presidents leaving office to surrender their files to NARA, which manages their libraries on their behalf.
"I have seen nothing that would indicate to me that it was anything other than accidental," US Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told US media. "It's easy to do, because paper moves if somebody moves."
22 January 2023, 05:43 GMT
University of Pennsylvania professor and historian Brian Rosenwald said on Twitter earlier this week that the problem was not “nefarious intent,” but “staffers rush packing thousands or millions of pages of documents.”
US Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) similarly pointed to improper procedures involving staffers going through former presidents’ files.
"If they're classified documents, then [people who find them] need to contact someone that has a security clearance that can handle it," Ernst was quoted by US media as saying. "Just by having staffers go through - staffers don't have security clearance. So, that concerns me as well. Across the board, I just think everybody should be treated the same."
Ernst also said it was a problem that former presidents weren’t fully aware of which files they did and did not have, signaling a need for greater scrutiny.
Although the FBI raided Trump’s mansion and considered using a warrant to search Biden’s family home for classified files, the Department of Justice has not brought any charges in any of the cases.