Congressional Republicans are largely brushing aside former Vice President Mike Pence’s revelation Tuesday that classified documents were discovered at his Indiana home while they suggest there is something more suspicious about the classified papers found at President Joe Biden’s home and former office.

Pence’s lawyer, Greg Jacob, said in a letter to the National Archives there appeared to be a small number of documents with classified markings that were “inadvertently boxed and transported to the personal home” after Pence left office in January 2020. The search was conducted by an “outside counsel, with experience in handling classified documents” and was performed “out of an abundance of caution” after the Biden documents were found, Jacobs said.

Pence “was unaware of the existence of sensitive or classified documents at his personal residence” and “stands ready and willing to cooperate fully with the National Archives and any appropriate inquiry,” Pence’s lawyer added.

Some GOP lawmakers appeared Tuesday and Wednesday to be more willing to forgive Pence, a Republican, than Biden, a Democrat.

In an appearance on Fox Business on Tuesday, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, characterized the Biden situation as “just a mess.”

“It is incompetent. It is corrupt,” Cruz said. “That is an enormous political problem for the Biden White House.”

Asked moments later about Pence, Cruz called the former vice president “a good man” and said his removal of classified documents was “a mistake.”

While GOP House members are already investigating Biden’s handling of classified documents, Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., the House Republican Conference chairwoman, sought to draw a distinction between the two cases.

“In the case of Vice President Mike Pence, he came forward and proactively reached out and is following the process,” she said during a news conference Wednesday. “In the case of Joe Biden, he has had classified documents going back to his time in the Senate, where he started serving before I was born. So this is a longstanding national security threat.”

The Biden White House has said a small number of documents with classified markings have been found during four different searches — one at Biden’s former think-tank office in Washington and three at his home in Wilmington, Delaware. The earliest discovery happened Nov. 2 at the Penn Biden Center. The most recent happened Friday in Wilmington, when Justice Department officials conducted a 13-hour search with Biden’s consent.

The first three searches found documents from Biden’s time as vice president. The latest one also found classified papers from when he served as a U.S. senator.

The Biden and Pence situations are unfolding as the Justice Department is also investigating former President Donald Trump for allegedly storing about 300 documents marked classified at his Mar-a-Lago resort after he left the White House. The government says it tried for more than a year to recover all the documents from Trump before the FBI conducted an unannounced search of his property in August. The investigation is also exploring whether Trump and his team have criminally obstructed the probe.

The Justice Department has appointed special counsels to lead investigations into both Trump and Biden.

Republicans, who have largely defended Trump, say the documents from Biden’s Senate tenure are especially concerning.

“I do not understand how a U.S. senator can take a classified document out of a SCIF [sensitive compartmented information facility] if they're not stuffing it in their pants or somewhere else,” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., told reporters Tuesday.

Republicans also have sought to tie the Biden documents to their allegations that the president was involved in his son Hunter’s foreign business dealings.

Stefanik said it was a “very important fact that Hunter Biden also had access and used as his home address where those classified documents were improperly and illegally stored.”

Cruz called for the FBI to search Hunter Biden’s homes and offices for more classified documents, as well boxes of files from Biden’s time in the Senate stored at the University of Delaware.

“If these classified materials in particular implicate Burisma, Ukraine, Communist China, payments going to Hunter Biden or Joe Biden’s brother or the Biden family, then this shifts from a political problem to a very serious problem of criminal liability and major crimes,” Cruz told Fox Business.

Biden has long maintained he stayed out of Hunter Biden’s business affairs. A Republican-led Senate investigation in 2020 found no evidence of wrongdoing by Joe or Hunter Biden involving the younger Biden’s work with Burisma Holdings, a private natural gas company in Ukraine whose board Hunter Biden served on. The White House has called Republicans’ accusations that the president was involved in his son’s business dealings “politically-motivated attacks chock full of long-debunked conspiracy theories.”

Not all Republicans were willing to quickly dismiss Pence’s situation. 

Shortly after the news broke Tuesday, Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, tweeted: “It is a serious matter for any government official to mishandle classified documents. I plan to ask for the same intelligence review and damage assessment to see if there are any national security concerns.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., saw things differently than most of his GOP colleagues. He said in a tweet he doesn’t believe Biden, Trump or Pence had any “sinister motives,” but added, “We have a classified information problem which needs to be fixed.”

Meanwhile, Rep. Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., the House Democratic Caucus chairman, appeared to regard the Biden and Pence situations similarly while portraying Trump’s handling of classified documents as more egregious. 

During a news conference Wednesday, Aguilar said he’s “frustrated” by anyone who “doesn't handle confidential and secret documents in the manner in which they're supposed to.”

“It’s clear that some protocols weren't followed,” he said. “I think, based on what we know, that the current president, President Biden, and Vice President Pence have handled this the way that they should and letting everyone know and talking to the Archives and law enforcement agencies as to what was what was found.

“It's clear that the former president didn't handle this appropriately and has obstructed every possible avenue in which authorities could view that material and lied about the material that he had in his possession.”

In a statement Tuesday, shortly after the Pence documents revelation, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., the top Democrat on the Republican-led House Oversight Committee that is investigating Biden’s handling of classified documents, criticized GOP lawmakers, saying their “glaring failure to acknowledge that former President Trump refused to cooperate with the government and continually rebuffed calls to turn over thousands of presidential records and hundreds of classified documents illustrates that they are simply not serious about” preserving presidential records and protected classified information.