sooner, rick scott, president biden is being favored over president trump, says congressman jim jordan. well, they also said that they re going to investigate. the party will. and that they re going to do it themselves if they have to. that s republicans. but now ten days later, republicans find themselves in the same flas house that democrats did. thanks to the other most recent, vice president mike pence, many of those who up in arms of joe biden s document discovery are changing their discussion. we have an epidemic of senior leaders taking classified home and we have to say categorically, republican or democrat, it is all wrong. obviously there is a systemic problem in the executive branch. handling classified information to be to improved on. we have more on the classification and tracking system and what can be done to fix it. we re also going to drig into the tricky test that sets up for house oversight and what options republicans have from here, joining me no
of the documents as the complexities of maintaining documents. you have other voices who are saying this really is a problem, and ultimately, it is the officeholder who bears the burden. certainly for a sitting president, there is less legal exposure, because we all learned during the trump years how you don t have legal action brought against a sitting president, even though there s all kinds of investigation that can happen, and certainly political damage. the former president of course, did the unusual thing, by coming to the defense of mike pence, on his social media, saying he has never knowingly done anything wrong in his life, he is an innocent man, so welcoming mike pence to this, to perhaps diffuse some of this. what all three men seem to have in common is a desire to run for president in 2024, so it will mean this issue will be an ongoing one about how do, how do american voters assess this. clearly there have been times where the handling of classified
we re talking about, much of monday being hung up on what the white house means is documents, items, and is it a box, a hard drive? and the third is mike pence is a republican and the house oversight committee is probably not going to spend much time investigating one of their own. it is as simple as that. pence reached out or pence s representatives reached out to jim comer before the news became public and they have been trying to manage this from a political perspective from before we knew about it and i think that is liable to continue and it should make hearings much more complicated for republicans because democrats have another thing to seize on here saying this is not a joe biden problem, this is a classified document executive branch sloppiness problem and an argument i suspect we will hear. are we hearing anything along those lines with the white house and i know the president was asked about classified document, kelly. what did he say in response? well, he respectfully d
there, it was an innocent mistake. if that s the case, that has happened many times in our history, and it s not a crime, and it shouldn t be a need for a criminal investigation. but given that there already is a special counsel investigating president biden s classified document problem, it poses a little built of a dilemma for the justice department. because it is the same explanation that the white house has given for president biden s documents, and again, i know that vice president pence, you know, is a bit red faced because he said he had nothing and lo and behold he did and those cases are different than donald trump even though he inadvertently might have taken the documents, he refused to give them up after multiple requests to do so. so when it comes to a special counsel, i know merrish garland is not saying one way or another but would there be a reason why mick pence wouldn t get a special counsel but president biden would? if the fbi and the review of this matter can c
we re also going to drig into the tricky test that sets up for house oversight and what options republicans have from here, joining me now on the reporting, nbc news justice and intelligence correspondent ken dilanian, nbc news senior white house correspondent, kelly o donnell, and nbc news senior capitol hill correspondent, garrett haake, and to explain what might be broken about our classification system, to help us understand what in the world is going on, director of the michael d. hayden center for intelligence policy and international security at george mason university, larry pfeiffer. also a former cia chief of staff and former senior director of the white house situation room. he s got pretty good credit to be on with is today. ken, for anyone who might have been under general anesthesia for the past few days, bring that person up to speed on what in the world happened with mike pence and what the justice department is going to do about it. yes, katie, even as we were all di