Both Colin Powell, left, and his successor Condoleezza Rice have been contacted by the FBI regarding their own use of personal email during their respective tenures as secretary of state. | AP Photo FBI contacts Colin Powell as part of email probe The State Department finding of classified emails sent to other secretaries could give Clinton new cover

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell said the FBI has contacted him about his use of personal email when he was the nation's top diplomat, as a review conducted by the State Department inspector general concluded that Powell and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice both received classified information through private email accounts.

The revelation that the State Department now believes both Rice and Powell received sensitive information via private accounts could give former secretary Hillary Clinton a new line of defense as she tries to dampen the controversy over classified information found on her own private email server.


The State Department inquiry identified 10 messages sent to Rice's immediate staff that were classified and two sent to Powell, according to Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the ranking member on the House Oversight and Benghazi committees.

The emails, Cummings said, appear to have no classification markings, and it is still unclear if the content of the emails was or should have been considered classified when the emails were originally written and sent.

In an interview with POLITICO Thursday. Powell vigorously disputed the sensitivity of the information sent to him through personal email, but he acknowledged the law enforcement interest in his email routine.

"The FBI has come to us," Powell said. Two FBI agents visited Powell late last year for a discussion an aide described as a casual conversation about email practices during his term as secretary from 2001 to 2005.

Powell said the pair of messages State is now calling classified had come from two different U.S. ambassadors abroad.

"They’re fairly innocuous and very benign and neither ambassador classified them at the time. They were merely information memos sent to State.gov," Powell said. "My executive assistants thought they should send them to me on my personal email. I found that personally acceptable. That's why I bought all those computers in the first place."

Powell seemed exasperated by State's latest claim. The agency has designated the two messages "Confidential," which is the lowest tier of classification.

"Now, 11 or 12 years later, as part of a whole process of reviewing things somebody in the department says, 'Well, they're classified.' My response to that is no they were not," Powell said. " You can say your judgment is they should have been classified but at the time they were not classified.

Clinton's presidential campaign said the news and Powell's reaction reinforces their view that Clinton's messages are being overclassified and that the retroactive judgments to do that are unfair.

"We agree with Sec. Powell that his emails are being overclassified & they should be released along [with] Hillary's," Clinton campaign chair John Podesta said on Twitter.

Campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said that the disclosures about Powell and Rice's emails reveal the controversy over purportedly classified information on Clinton's emails is "bogus."

“This is a major development. In fact, I would go as far as to say it’s a game changer," Fallon said on MSNBC. "You have a government bureaucracy that has an excessive treatment of what should be considered classified information and now we’re finding that the same agency that has been looking into Hillary Clinton’s emails and having that excessive definition of what should be treated as classified is making the same judgment about Hillary Clinton’s predecessors...We think that any fair minded person if they judge the contents would see that this is overreach — this is excessive classification."

But conservative groups disputed that, saying Clinton's situation was significantly different than Powell's. They also pointed to the sheer volume of classified documents that passed through Clinton’s server, and noted that some classifications reached higher, more sensitive levels, including “top secret.”

“The fact remains Secretary Clinton is the only cabinet official to ever house and maintain a private server in her basement that contained all of her work and personal emails,” said Jeff Bechdel, America Rising PAC communications director, in a statement. “The security of that server and the risk it posed to national security is at the heart of the FBI's ongoing investigation — not 12-year-old emails sent to Secretaries of past administrations."

Rice has maintained she did not use email during her tenure as secretary. The messages sent to her apparently were emailed to her close aides. NBC News, which first reported State's conclusions said the ten messages sent to her are a mix of information classified at the "Confidential" level and the "Secret" level, which is the middle tier of classification.

An aide to Rice, Georgia Godfrey, said the messages in question did not contain intelligence reports but solely diplomatic exchanges.

"She did not use email as Secretary nor have a personal email account. My understanding is that the report is in reference to emails sent to her assistant reporting diplomatic conversations and they contained no intelligence information," Godfrey said in a statement.

Godfrey told POLITICO Rice had not been contacted by the FBI.

More than 1,600 of Clinton's messages have been deemed classified — although they were not marked that way when sent. Dozens have now been designated "Secret" or "Top Secret."

Cummings, a longtime defender of Clinton, held up the new information about the former secretaries as proof that the email controversy surrounding the 2016 Democratic frontrunner was overplayed. He blasted Republicans for trying to use the issue to hurt Clinton in the polls.

“My concern has been that Republicans are spending millions of taxpayer dollars singling out Secretary Clinton because she is running for President — often leaking inaccurate information — while at the same time disregarding the actions of Republican Secretaries of State,” Cummings said. “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,”

Cummings indicated he has requested copies of the emails.

Rep. Eliot Engel, Ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the news proves that use of private email is a systematic problem in government — not just a Clinton problem.

“The truth couldn’t be plainer: the private-email problem is not a Hillary Clinton problem,” he said in a statement. “It’s a government-wide problem that’s existed since the advent of email itself. The manner in which sensitive information is dealt with just hasn’t kept up with advancements in technology. And that's the problem we should be focused on.”

The State inspector general has been reviewing the email practices of the five previous Secretaries of State. In a letter sent to Undersecretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy and shared Wednesday with Congress, the internal watchdog office expressed concerns that additional classified information may still reside on State’s unclassified archive of email messages.

State Department spokesman John Kirby declined to elaborate on the inspector general's findings but confirmed receiving the report.

"We’re in receipt of a letter from the IG regarding sensitive information....We’ll respond accordingly," Kirby said. "Obviously, we take the protection of sensitive information very seriously."

Powell also noted some ways his situation was different from Clinton’s, for example, that he used a commercial email account. “I had no private server, no private domain. I did not take [any messages] anywhere when I left the department,” he said.

Clinton’s messages resided on a private server that was kept mainly at her family home in Chappaqua, N.Y. She turned over about 30,000 such messages to the State Department at its request in late 2014 and discarded another roughly 32,000 messages deemed personal.

Powell did say that he believes the debate over Clinton’s emails is being colored by her presidential run.

“You know the politics,” he said.

Eliza Collins contributed to this report.