A top police official in Salem, New Hampshire, said Friday he was unaware of any security threat that would have caused Vice President Mike Pence to abruptly cancel his planned visit there this week as suggested by administration officials.
Pence was scheduled to speak with patients at an opioid recovery center on Tuesday, but just before Air Force Two took off he postponed and stayed behind in Washington for reasons still undisclosed.
After some initial mixed messaging, administration officials said the trip was canceled due to a security issue in New Hampshire, without providing any details.
President Donald Trump hinted at that explanation Friday, telling reporters that there was “a very interesting problem that they had in New Hampshire, but I can’t tell you about it.”
“There was a problem up there, and I won’t go into what the problem was, but you’ll see in about a week or two,” Trump said.
But that was news to Salem deputy police chief Joel Dolan, who said in an interview that if there had been a concern, the local police would have been aware of it.
“We were not aware of any threats to the vice president or the facility,” Dolan said. “We would have known about it. It would have been addressed by us.”
Dolan said he was standing with Secret Service agents around 11 a.m. when they received word that the vice president was not coming. Dolan said the agents, who had done a sweep of the facility, seemed surprised as well.
A Pence aide told the New Hampshire crowd that “there’s been an emergency callback” so Pence wouldn’t be coming. Pence spokeswoman Alyssa Farah quickly sought to clarify on Twitter that there was no emergency, but that “something came up that required the @VP to remain in Washington.”
Administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity later said it had to do with a security concern in New Hampshire, but still provided no further details, adding to the shroud of mystery around Pence’s canceled trip. Officials said there was frustration among some in the vice president’s office over how the decision was publicly explained, leading to widespread speculation about what had happened.
“It’s sort of cryptic,” Dolan said, who has not been given an update since Tuesday. “We’ll be looking for the information to come out as well.”
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