Rice aides, Powell got classified info on personal email accounts

Hillary Clinton gained an apparent ally Thursday in her fight to limit the political damage from her growing email controversy, as former Republican secretary of state Colin L. Powell said he disagreed with a State Department decision to retroactively classify two emails from his own personal account while in office. Rice and Powell served under Republican administrations.

“According to the memo, on December 29, 2015, the Department advised the OIG [Office of Inspector General] that 12 of these emails contain classified national security information, two of which were sent to the personal email account of Secretary Powell and ten of which were sent to the personal email accounts of Secretary Rice’s immediate staff”, the letter from Cummings reads.

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.

Rice, now at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, was not available to comment, but her chief of staff, Georgia Godfrey, said she did not use email or have a personal email account while secretary.

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., criticized Chaffetz for launching a new investigation even in light of the report that the former Republican secretaries of state and their immediate staffs had classified information on their personal accounts.

Clinton has argued that the messages from her email have since been deemed classified by the intelligence community as part of an “inter-agency dispute” between the intelligence community and the State Department over whether the information should have been classified.

It became public last March that Clinton set up a private email server in her NY home for her work as President Barack Obama’s secretary of state between 2009 and 2013.

Clinton, meantime, is facing new scrutiny from congressional Republicans as a fourth committee is pressing for general information about the handling of government documents, use of personal emails and the response to Freedom of Information requests during her time at the State Department. Three other committees are already focused on the former secretary of state- the special House panel on the attacks in Benghazi, Libya, the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate Homeland and Governmental Affairs Committee.

House Speaker Paul Ryan said Thursday he respects the FBI investigation, but gave no indication that he would stop Chaffetz from also conducting an inquiry.

But debate moderator Chuck Todd asked a follow-up, saying, “There is an open FBI investigation into this matter about how you may have handled classified material”.

Clinton’s server did not encrypt emails, a fact that let critics raise concerns about hackers who may have obtained classified information from her correspondence.

Clinton initially said that setting up the private server was a matter of convenience, but later conceded it was a mistake.

The emails were discovered during a State Department review of the email practices of the past five secretaries of state.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., however, called the news “a watershed moment”. State Department Inspector General Steve Linick elaborated on the issue in a letter to Patrick Kennedy, Undersecretary of State.

During her time as Secretary of State, Clinton sent and received multiple emails that have since been marked classified.

In a statement to ABC News, a representative for Rice reiterated that the Secretary never used a private email account of her own during her tenure.