Republican Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina spoke to The Independent and drew a difference between the investigation into documents found in locations associated with President Joe Biden and documents located at former president Donald Trump’s home.
The Independent spoke to Ms Mace in an exclusive interview for a profile to be published this weekend. The interview came as Mr Biden faces scrutiny after documents from his time as vice president were found both at his home in Delaware and the Penn Biden Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
This past weekend, the Justice Department found documents dating back to Mr Biden’s time as a US Senator.
Republicans have sought to draw a comparison between that and the Department of Justice executing a search warrant at Mr Trump’s Mar-a-Lago state in Florida in August. Earlier this month, the House voted to create a select subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government largely in response to what they saw as the federal government’s unfair targeting of the former president.
“It’s hard to say what’s apples to apples or apples to oranges because we don’t actually know the content of the documents that are classified,” Ms Mace told The Independent, adding that it’s hard to know how bad it is or if it’s “a nothing burger.”
“So, unless you have that clearance and have the ability to actually see what was in those boxes, it's really hard to say that's the first thing and that's, that's the first thing,” she said.
Ms Mace added that people knew that Mr Trump held documents.
“The National Archives, FBI, the DOJ and they knew where they were, they knew they were where they were located, even at one point had access to the room where they were located apparently,” she said. “In the case of the current president, for five years, no one knew me. Nobody knew that these documents existed, where they were and how they got there and who had access to them. So in that respect, there are differences between the current and the former, based on you know, knowing that these things existed, nobody knew.”
The South Carolina Republican also criticised the fact the president did not inform the public in November right before the midterm elections.
“ I mean, they want to say that they're transparent, but it's not transparent when you don't disclose this to the public,” she said. “I mean, you just took the former president to task all summer long about classified documents.”
Mr Trump and Mr Biden are not the only former executive branch officials to find classified documents in their home. Earlier this week, CNN reported that former vice president Mike Pence found classified documents at his home and turned them over to an FBI field office in Indiana.
But Ms Mace said she had not seen enough information on Mr Pence’s situation to make a judgment.
“I’m not excusing anybody, ok,” she said. This is not a good situation for any current or former president.”
