As scrutiny over Hillary Clinton’s private email use heats up, a top House Democrat is drilling down on an inspector general’s claim that former secretaries of state may have transmitted a handful of classified emails on their personal accounts.
Rep. Elijah Cummings, top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said Thursday his office had learned a months-long inspector general probe of the email practices of five previous secretaries of state had uncovered evidence that 12 emails containing classified information had surfaced among the private records of Colin Powell and the “immediate staff” of Condoleezza Rice.
Cummings said two of the classified emails were sent to Powell’s private email address and the other 10 were sent to Rice’s staff, according to a letter Cummings sent to Secretary of State John Kerry Thursday.
The letter came on the heels of reports that Rep. Jason Chaffetz, chairman of the Oversight Committee, planned to open a controversial investigation of private email use by government officials that would have focused in part on Clinton’s use of a personal server network. Republican leadership reportedly discouraged the probe, according to a report Thursday by Politico.
A spokeswoman for Chaffetz did not return a request for comment.
Cummings questioned why congressional Republicans had “singled out” Clinton for her private email use while Powell and Rice, both secretaries of state under a Republican president, had also received unmarked classified information.
“Last night, we were informed by the State Department Inspector General that former Secretary Colin Powell and the immediate staff of former Secretary Condoleezza Rice received classified national security information on their personal email accounts. The emails apparently had no classification markings, and it remains unclear whether the information in the emails was or should have been considered classified at the time it was sent,” Cummings said Thursday.
“Based on this new revelation, it is clear that the Republican investigations are nothing more than a transparent political attempt to use taxpayer funds to target the Democratic candidate for president,” he added.
The Maryland Democrat has been a vocal opponent of congressional investigations involving Clinton over the past year. Cummings is also the ranking member of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, which first discovered Clinton’s use of a private email address.
Clinton’s supporters have frequently attempted to defend Clinton’s private email use by noting that former secretaries of state and other cabinet officials, such as Defense Secretary Ash Carter, have sent and received official communications from their personal inboxes.
However, no other official at Clinton’s level set up a private network hosted entirely on a server in their control, and few other officials appear to have used a personal email address exclusively for government work.
Kerry asked the State Department’s inspector general to look into agency record-keeping practices in the wake of controversy over Clinton’s private email use last spring.
While that review is still underway, Cummings asked the State Department Thursday to provide documents related to the probe, including records that could shed light on the extent of classified information sent to and from the past five secretaries of state over unsecured channels.
