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Tuesday, July 19, 2016
Classified Data Found in Personal Email of Colin Powell and Aides to Condoleezza Rice
In 2004, Condoleezza
Rice, left, the Bush administration’s national security adviser, with Secretary
of State Colin L. Powell in the Oval Office.Credit Doug
Mills/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — The State Department has discovered a dozen
emails containing classified information that were sent to the personal email
accounts of Colin
L. Powell and close aides of Condoleezza
Rice during their tenures as secretaries of state for President George
W. Bush.
Two emails were sent to Mr. Powell’s personal account, and
10 to personal accounts of Ms. Rice’s senior aides. Those emails have now been
classified as “confidential” or “secret” as part of a review process that has
resulted in similar “upgrades” of information sent through the personal email
server that Hillary
Clinton used while she was secretary of state from 2009 to 2013. The State
Department did not say who sent the emails to Mr. Powell or to Ms. Rice’s aides,
or who received the messages.
It is against the law to have classified information
outside a secure government account.
Of the nearly 30,000 emails from Mrs. 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, and 1,564 others have
been classified at the lower level of “confidential.”
Last week, the State Department said that 22 emails had
now been classified as “top secret” and would not be released, and would have
part or all of their contents redacted, or blacked out. A review of 3,700 more
emails by the department and intelligence agencies continues.
The designation of emails by two other secretaries of
state underscored how discussions of sensitive issues of the nation’s diplomacy
had sometimes been conducted on email accounts outside the department’s computer
networks. Mrs. Clinton’s campaign team has cited the use of personal email by
other secretaries of state to suggest that the controversy about her email
server had been exaggerated for partisan reasons during the 2016 presidential
campaign.
The State Department’s inspector general, Steve A. Linick,
wrote in a letter on Wednesday that a review of communications with four other
secretaries of state had uncovered the 12 emails and that they should be removed
from the department’s archives. Even though the emails were not marked
classified at the time, Mr. Linick said the information in the emails should
have been recognized as secret or confidential because of the subjects and
annotations cautioning against distributing the emails widely.
Mr. Linick wrote to the under secretary of state for
management, Patrick F. Kennedy, that “the substance of the material and “NODIS”
(No Distribution) references in the body or subject lines of some of the
documents suggested that the documents could be potentially sensitive.”
Mr. Powell, in a telephone
interview, disputed the department’s designation, saying he had reviewed the two
emails with the inspector general’s office and responded incredulously, “What
are you talking about?” The emails, he said, were sent by two career ambassadors
and forwarded to him by his executive assistant, something he encouraged for
important matters. One involved a kidnapping in the Philippines, the other
general views on the situation in the Middle East. Both, he said, were now
considered “confidential.” Continue
reading the main story
“That is an absurdity,” he said.
If two seasoned diplomats could not discuss their views with the secretary in
unclassified emails, he said, “we might as well shut the department down.”
Ms. Rice, now at the Hoover Institution at Stanford
University, was not available to comment, but her chief of staff, Georgia D.
Godfrey, said that she did not use email or have a personal email account while
secretary. She noted that the inspector general said the email in question
involved “diplomatic conversations” sent to her assistants and contained “no
intelligence information.”
The existence of the memo was first reported by NBC News.
The New York Times later obtained a copy. It was marked “not for distribution”
and was intended to give the State Department 10 days to respond to the
recommendations Mr. Linick made about handling the newly classified emails and
the archives of the secretaries, who also include Madeleine
K. Albright and John
Kerry.
How Does the Government Classify Secrets?
An explanation of the classification
system that the government uses to protect information it deems critical to
national security.
The premature disclosure appeared to reflect escalating
tension between two inspectors general leading the investigation into Mrs.
Clinton’s emails — as well as between Democrats and Republicans on Capitol
Hill.
Representative Eliot L. Engel of New York, the top
Democrat on the Foreign Affairs Committee, issued a statement accusing
Republicans of running a “multimillion-dollar political sideshow aimed at
derailing Secretary Clinton’s presidential campaign.”
“The truth couldn’t be plainer: The private-email problem
is not a Hillary
Clinton problem. It’s a governmentwide problem that’s existed since the
advent of email itself,” the statement read.
A cover letter accompanying the State Department inspector
general’s memo, distributed widely on Capitol Hill on Wednesday night, expressed
irritation that some lawmakers had been briefed about the memo’s contents even
though it was not completed and the State Department had not been given enough
opportunity to respond to it.
The cover letter said that the
inspector general for the nation’s intelligence agencies, I. Charles McCullough
III, had “erroneously” given the memo to aides of members of the House and
Senate Intelligence Committees.
Mr. McCullough has been criticized in recent weeks by
members of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign team, who have accused him of colluding with
Republicans on the investigation into her emails. Although he was appointed
inspector general by President Obama, they point to a $1,000 donation he made in
2004 to Mr. Bush’s re-election campaign.
The State Department’s spokesman, John Kirby, said that it
would respond to the inspector’s memo but would not provide any comment now.
The controversy over Mrs. Clinton’s use of a personal
email server — which she has said was a mistake — has broadened into a review of
all the secretaries in the age of widespread electronic communication. Mr.
Powell said the advent of email, which he helped usher in at the department, had
transformed the work of the nation’s diplomats, speeding communications with one
another and Washington.
Mrs. Clinton’s released emails included ones written by
her successor, Mr. Kerry. One, dated May 19, 2011, titled “Omitted thoughts in
Memo,” describes a visit by Mr. Kerry, then a senator, to Pakistan days after
the killing of Osama bin Laden that month and refers to a previous memo he had
sent.
“I re-read the Memo when I returned home and realized I
left out a couple of thoughts,” he wrote. “And, as the saying goes, I’m sorry I
didn’t have time to make it shorter.”
Much of what follows has been blocked out and classified
now as secret. It will not be eligible for declassification and public release
until 2036. Mr. Kerry sent it from his iPad, using an email address that has
been blocked out.
Mrs. Clinton, nine days later, forwarded it to an aide
from her email address — hrod17@clintonemail.com — with a brief
note, “Pls print.”
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