HARRISBURG — On Tuesday night, Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen G. Kane went on national television and said children were depicted in some of the images her office discovered when reviewing pornographic e-mails exchanged among state employees.

Asked by a CNN reporter to describe the sexually explicit messages unearthed in the scandal, Kane said: “They are deplorable: hard-core, sometimes graphic, sometimes violent e-mails that had a string of videos and pictures depicting sometimes children, old women — some of them involved violent sexual acts against women.”

By Wednesday morning, her office was tempering her statement, saying that while a handful of the e-mails included photos of young children, they did not constitute child pornography.

“We are not saying that it reached the level of child pornography,” said Renee Martin, Kane’s spokeswoman.

Martin insisted that Kane had not misspoken in the interview: “I think what she said is accurate. The images “are deplorable. And some contained seniors and children.”

Tuesday night’s segment on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360 reviewed the pornographic e-mail scandal that has roiled Harrisburg since Kane, a Democrat, released in late September the names of eight men who traded e-mails between 2008 and 2012 that contained sexually explicit content. The e-mails were discovered during her office’s review of the Jerry Sandusky child sexual-abuse case.