Former Pence chief of staff: FBI search of Pence home for any more classified material ‘not too far off’

By Hannah Rabinowitz, CNN

Marc Short, the former chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence, suggested Wednesday that an FBI search of Pence’s Indiana home for any additional classified materials is “not too far off into the future.”

“There have been conversations about a consensual search to be conducted, and I presume that’s not too far off into the future,” Short told CNN’s Jake Tapper.

Pence would give the FBI full access to look throughout his home, Short added, just as President Joe Biden’s legal team said he had done during a search of Biden’s home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, last week.

As CNN previously reported, Pence’s representatives have been in talks with the Justice Department over searches of his home, as well as his office in Washington. They have said that they want to completely cooperate, though they do not believe there are additional classified documents in either place.

A lawyer for Pence found about a dozen documents marked as classified at his home in January.

In the interview on Wednesday, Short slammed what he saw as a “double standard” in how the FBI and Justice Department have approached retrieving documents from Pence’s and Biden’s homes, saying it took federal agents weeks before they went to the president’s Delaware home but that they had traveled to Pence’s Indiana residence the same day documents were discovered.

No documents with classified markings were found during the search of the president’s Rehoboth home, according to Biden’s personal lawyer.

The president defended his handling of the documents issue to PBS NewsHour’s Judy Woodruff on Wednesday, saying he never had to be threatened to cooperate and that he has “voluntarily opened every single aperture” he has for searches.

“To the best of my knowledge, the kinds of things they picked up are things from 1974, stray papers. There may be something else I don’t know,” he said. “But, one of the things that happened is that what was not done well, is as they packed up my offices to move them, they didn’t do the kind of job that should have been done to go thoroughly through every single piece of literature that’s there.”

Short said that despite the controversy, Pence is continuing to consider whether he will run for president in 2024.

“I don’t think he hears concern about (the documents) when he travels across the country,” Short said. “I think he hears encouragement from people as he travels.”

But an announcement about any potential presidential run is not expected any time soon, according to Short.

“I think the trajectory of most candidates who get in early to Republican primaries doesn’t really fare too well, so I think there is a benefit to him waiting until the end of this process,” he said.

This story has been updated with additional details.

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CNN’s Nikki Carvajal and Jack Forrest contributed to this report.