Rep. Mike Turner, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, said Sunday he and other members who work with classified information are “stumped” that presidents and vice presidents could be so careless with classified information.
“We don’t understand how this could be happening. We don’t understand how all three could have been so lackadaisical about this,” Turner (R-Ohio) said on CNN’s “State of the Union” in discussing classified documents found in private spaces associated with former President Donald Trump, former Vice President Mike Pence and President Joe Biden.
He called them each out by name: “I don’t get it with Biden, Pence or Trump,” Turner said to host Jake Tapper.
Since the revelations that all three of them have possessed classified documents, members of Congress have expressed outrage at the apparent mishandling, though much of it has fallen along defensive partisan lines. There’s also been a certain befuddlement, particularly among those in Congress who sometimes handle classified material, as to why anyone would take any of this material home.
“They are not to be taken lightly. And we’re just amazed as people keep finding them stuffed in the strangest places, like behind Biden’s Corvette,” Turner said, referring to the discovery of documents in Biden’s garage.
Sensitive materials have been found in Biden’s Wilmington, Del., home, and in a private office space associated with him. The FBI found a classified document in a consensual search of Pence’s suburban Indianapolis home Friday, after one of his lawyers found a dozen classified documents in the home in January.
In the first high-profile discovery, law enforcement found a large number of classified documents while executing a search warrant for former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate last year.
Turner has previously pondered how and why these classified documents ended up where they did.
“I can’t imagine a circumstance where anyone would believe that they need to have them in their home,” he said last month on ABC’s “This Week.”
