The news that classified documents have also been found at former Vice President Mike Pence's Indiana home shows the removal of such papers has become an "institutional type of issue" that goes beyond what people thought was playing out with President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, Rep. Scott Fitzgerald said on Newsmax Wednesday.
"We still don't know what the documents are," the Wisconsin Republican told Newsmax's "Wake Up America." "It could be scheduling. It could be anything from truly a classified document that was removed from a SCIF [sensitive compartmented information facility] briefing. We just don't know what at this point, and I think that's why a lot of members of Congress are very frustrated by the whole thing."
Pence's lawyer said Tuesday that documents with classified markings were discovered in Pence's Indiana home last week, after having been "inadvertently" boxed with other materials and shipped there.
Trump was quick to defend his vice president, saying on his Truth Social page that "he never did anything knowingly dishonest in his life" and to "leave him alone."
However, Fitzgerald said there are differences between what's playing out with Biden as compared to Trump or Pence, as he believes there was some "ill intent" in Biden's case.
"Obviously there is a long list of accusations either related to Hunter Biden or to the president's brothers and China, so it's a little bit different," he said. "What it's going to take, I think, is for one of these committees to go in there and dissect this."
Still, he said, the cases prove that the "chaos of somebody leaving office seems to be to take any box you want and drive it down the road, so that's unacceptable."
Fitzgerald also commented on the news that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has removed Democrat Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell from the powerful House Intelligence Committee.
"There's a real concern here if you talk to not only members of our conference behind closed doors, and talk to some members of the Democrat conference about their concerns about how things were run in Intel when it was the 'shifty Schiff' show,' " he said. "There was a lot of concern about the way all the facts were being played with very loosely over there."
He added that the Republican conference was "fully behind" McCarthy with the move.
Finally, Fitzgerald spoke out against the move by DirecTV to remove Newsmax from its systems, saying it's "not acceptable" that "any satellite dish corporation would be squelching the conservative voice."
The satellite systems are also a concern, he said, because the local news angle has been frozen out," a major complaint members of Congress hear from their constituency.
"We hear about it from a customer perspective all the time when we're in the district," he said. "I just wish this could be resolved, and if Congress does have a way of playing into this then let's talk about it then and see if we can't get some resolution."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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