Former US Vice President Mike Pence speaks in the course of the Nixon National Energy Conference on the Richard Nixon Presidential Library & Museum in Yorba Linda, California, on Wednesday, April 19, 2023.
Eric Thayer | Bloomberg | Getty Images
No charges shall be filed against former Vice President Mike Pence within the Department of Justice investigation of classified documents found at his Indiana home.
The Justice Department’s national security division told Pence’s attorney in a letter that it was closing its probe and that it will not file charges based on the “results” of its investigation, NBC News reported earlier Friday morning.
A DOJ official, who requested anonymity to debate the matter, confirmed to CNBC the authenticity of the letter, which was sent Thursday. One other source aware of the matter, who also requested anonymity to debate the probe, confirmed that Pence wouldn’t face charges. Pence’s attorney didn’t immediately reply to CNBC’s requests for comment.
The probe’s conclusion comes lower than per week before Pence is reportedly set to announce he’s running for president. The Republican primary campaign will put Pence in competition together with his onetime boss, former President Donald Trump, who’s embroiled in a much larger investigation over classified documents that were stored at his resort home Mar-a-Lago after he left office in 2021.
In January, Pence’s lawyer said a “small number” of classified documents had been found at his home in Carmel, Indiana. The lawyer said Pence was unaware that the documents were there, and that he had engaged outside counsel to look his home for such materials “out of an abundance of caution” following the invention of classified records at President Joe Biden’s personal home.
Lower than a month later, the FBI conducted a five-hour search of Pence’s residence and located an extra classified document.
Trump, meanwhile, faces a federal criminal investigation into the tons of of classified documents which have been faraway from Mar-a-Lago since he left the White House. An FBI search of the Palm Beach, Florida, resort last August turned up greater than 100 additional classified records and a slew of other materials taken by the federal agents.
A DOJ special counsel is leading the investigation into those documents, in addition to into the possible obstruction of the probe. Trump has denied wrongdoing and publicly claimed he declassified the records on his property. News outlets reported this week that the special counsel obtained an audio tape from 2021 during which Trump acknowledged that a document he kept after his presidency was classified.
In a social media post Friday, Trump said it was “great” that the DOJ was not bringing charges against Pence, but wondered when he, too, shall be “fully exonerated.”
“I’m not less than as innocent as he’s,” Trump wrote of Pence.
