WASHINGTON — Hillary Clinton gained an apparent ally Thursday in her fight to limit the political damage from her growing e-mail controversy, as former Republican Secretary of State Colin Powell said he disagreed with a State Department decision to retroactively classify two e-mails from his own personal account while in office.
“I have reviewed the messages, and I do not see what makes them classified,” Powell said of the e-mails, which were uncovered late last year by the State Department’s inspector general and, he said, brought to his attention by the department in recent weeks.
The e-mails, initially sent to the State Department by two U.S. ambassadors serving abroad and forwarded to Powell’s account by an aide, were described in notifications sent to Congress in recent days by the State Department and intelligence community inspectors general.
Those notifications also said that 10 e-mails with retroactively classified information had been found on private accounts of the “immediate staff” of Condoleezza Rice, his immediate successor in the second term of the George W. Bush administration.
The originators of the messages to Powell did not classify them, he said, and “if the department wishes to say a dozen years later they should have been classified, that is an opinion of the department that I do not share.”
Powell has said in the past that he found the State Department computer system, including Internet and e-mail, to be woefully inadequate when he took office there in 2001. He devoted substantial resources to improving it but also made liberal use of his personal AOL account.
His entry into the controversy capped a week of revelations and allegations that began with the State Department’s acknowledgment last week that it agreed with an intelligence assessment that “top secret” information was included in 22 of the tens of thousands of e-mails that passed through Clinton’s private server.