After months of media attacks on Hillary Clinton regarding her use of personal email accounts, NBC now reports that classified information was sent to the personal email accounts of two additional former secretaries of state: Colin Powell and the senior staff of Condoleezza Rice.
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In a letter requesting further information from Secretary of State John F. Kerry, Cummings said the memo indicated that a records review was being conducted of five previous secretaries of state and their immediate staffs. Out of “potentially sensitive records” referred by the inspector general to the department for further review, he said, the inspector general reported that 12, dating between February 2003 and June 2008, were determined to contain “classified national security information”.
Cummings has written Secretary of State John Kerry seeking more information about the emails from Powell and Rice’s tenure at the State Department.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign claimed vindication in the long-running emails saga on Thursday when it emerged that two Republican secretaries of state had also received information later deemed classified on personal accounts.
Of the almost 30,000 emails from Clinton’s server that have been released by the State Department under a court order, 18 emails sent to or from her have also been classified as secret, while 1,564 others have been classified at the lower level of confidential.
Rice has said she didn’t use emails while she was secretary of state, so the messages were allegedly sent to her closest aides.
In light of this new revelation, Cummings sent a letter to the State Department on Thursday asking for copies of the emails as well as exchanges between the department, inspector general and others. “Two of these documents were emails sent to Secretary Powell’s personal email account and the remaining were documents transmitted to personal email accounts of Secretary Rice’s immediate staff”, OIG said in a document.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton isn’t the only political figure with email troubles.
The top diplomats of the George W. Bush administration were found by a State Department watchdog to have received sensitive national security information in their non-government email addresses.
Powell said both messages to him, which originated with American ambassadors, were not classified.
“I have reviewed the messages and I do not see what makes them classified”, Powell said. “The Ambassadors did not believe the contents were Confidential at the time and they were sent as unclassified”. In the letter, State Department Inspector General Steve Linick warns that there may be much more now-classified material buried in the department’s unclassified archives. “They were merely information memo sent to State.gov. My executive assistants thought they should send them to me on my personal email”.
Georgia Godfrey, chief of staff for Rice, said Rice did not use email as secretary nor have a personal email account. Speaking about Clinton, he recently said: “I’m not specifically trying to target the secretary, but when she creates her own private email system, she’s ensnarled herself”.
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Powell has previously said the state department was technologically backward when he joined in 2001 and that he had to fight to get an internet-connected computer installed in his office, from which he continued to use his personal email account.
