Former Vice President Mike Pence alleged that the Justice Department (DOJ) failed to make sufficient effort to retrieve the sensitive and confidential papers that were brought to the Mar-a-Lago house of former President Trump before carrying out a search warrant there earlier this year.
Pence asserted that “there had to be many other ways to resolve those issues” and gather the additional papers during an interview with Chuck Todd on Sunday’s episode of NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“They didn’t try everything. And I have to tell you, going to the last resort of executing a search warrant against a former president of the United States I think sent the wrong message. It was a divisive message in this country,” Pence said, as cited by The Hill.
Several media reports said that the FBI got in touch with Trump’s legal team in an effort to locate the lost papers and pass them over to government archives after his presidency.
Prior to the FBI conducting the search and obtaining hundreds of pages of papers, Trump repeatedly thwarted the DOJ’s attempts to recover the documents.
Additionally, according to Pence, the search sends the incorrect message to nations across the world who see the United States as “the gold standard.” He said that in “third-world” nations, it was common for a new leader to take office just to arrest and imprison the outgoing one.
America shouldn’t ever be connected to that perception, the former VP added.
To prevent any conflicts of interest, Attorney General Merrick Garland named a special counsel on Friday to handle the probes into the papers discovered at Mar-a-Lago and the attempts to rig the 2020 presidential election.
Garland stated in his speech that he believed such an appointment was required in light of the fact that President Biden and Donald Trump had both declared their plans to run for office.
Pence expressed his hope that the DOJ will “carefully consider” taking any more action in the inquiry.
The former vice president made news during the previous week with a number of high-profile media appearances. He was notable for refusing to invalidate the 2020 election results while overseeing the certification procedure in Congress on January 6, 2021.
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