Pence shunned Trump when the FBI raided him with the pretext of classified documents. When Pence gave unelected agencies ammunition to come after him, Trump defended him.
The Department of Justice plans to execute a search of former Vice President Mike Pence’s Indiana home after the Republican revealed last week that his lawyer found about a dozen classified documents in his house.
His designated representative wrote in a letter to the National Archives that Pence “was unaware of the existence of sensitive or classified documents at his personal residence” and “stands ready and willing to cooperate fully with the National Archives and any appropriate inquiry.”
His apparent “cooperation,” a pretense corporate media keeps using to excuse President Joe Biden for hiding classified documents in his office and homes, appears to have spared him the ire former President Donald Trump received from the media, the Biden regime, and the FBI when classified documents were recovered from his home in August.
Trump even rushed to defend his former right-hand man when Pence outed himself to the feds.
“Mike Pence is an innocent man. He never did anything knowingly dishonest in his life. Leave him alone!!!” Trump said on his social media platform Truth.
Trump’s defense of Pence wasn’t just surprising thanks to the Republicans’ hot and cold relationship. It was especially magnanimous considering Pence’s previous statements dunking on Trump for keeping top-secret information in his home.
Shortly after the FBI raided former president Trump’s home in August, Pence reassured the media that he did not take any classified documents when he left the White House. Despite the clear indicators that the raid on Trump, authorized by Merrick Garland himself, was politically motivated, Pence declined to cast judgment on the situation.
“I honestly don’t want to prejudge it before until we know all the facts,” he said.
Pence may not have wanted to weigh in on the motivation for the raid, but he had no problem using the DOJ’s targeting of Trump as an excuse to further trash the man who elevated Pence to the White House as vice president.
“I’ve not hesitated to criticize the president when I think he was wrong. And clearly, possessing classified documents in an unprotected area is not proper,” Pence said in an interview on NBC’s Chuck Todd in November.
Pence was clearly not eager to defend Trump as his new book, “So Help Me God,” detailing the end of his “close working relationship” with the former president, was scheduled to hit the shelves in November. Even before Trump’s document raid, Pence spent months publicly clashing and then distancing himself from the administration and president he once served.
“People want to get back to the successful policies of the Trump-Pence administration, but some of the most ardent Republicans in the country had pulled me aside and said, ‘We need leadership that will unite the country around our values,’” Pence told Todd.
It was not until more than two months after the raid that Pence finally publicly disagreed with the Department of Justice, something other Republicans did on day one, for sending “the wrong message to the wider world.”
“I believe there had to be many better ways to resolve that issue than executing a search warrant at the personal residence of a former president of the United States,” Pence told ABC’s David Muir.
By the time Pence gave that interview to yet another corrupt corporate media outlet, the FBI was already aware that Biden had classified documents in his Penn Biden Center and would soon learn of several other batches of material hidden next to the corvette in Biden’s Delaware garage.
That news didn’t hit the media until the new year. After that, it only took a couple of weeks for Pence to come forward with sensitive papers his lawyer found stored in his home. Once again, Pence showed a complete lack of understanding of the political situation the nation faces, with the deep state flexing its muscles to give unelected bureaucrats tacit control over elected officials.
Pence made a mistake in overconfidently stating he did not have possession of top-secret documents. His bigger mistake was spending far too much time trying to set himself up for a White House run following the 2020 election instead of trying to unite the party and maintain proper skepticism of weaponized U.S. intelligence bureaucracies whose actions are increasingly akin to those of banana republics.
While Trump stayed consistent in his classified document messaging, Pence blew his one chance to unite Republicans and Americans around an issue most of them agree on: the deep politicization of the FBI and DOJ.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire and Fox News. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.