Pressed by the F.B.I. about her email practices at the State Department, Hillary Clinton told investigators that former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell had advised her to use a personal email account. “The truth is, she was using [the private email server] for a year before I sent her a memo telling her what I did”, Powell told People on Saturday.
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On Friday, Powell’s office told NBC, in part, “General Powell has no recollection of the dinner conversation”.
“At the time there was no equivalent system within the department”, the statement said, adding that Powell used a secure department computer to manage classified information.
The department says it does not yet know what portion of the emails is related to Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state.
People magazine reported in a Twitter message that Powell said that Clinton’s “people have been trying to pin” her email scandal on him.
Powell’s and Clinton’s use of personal email – and the systems that they set up – differed.
Powell issued the statement after veteran political journalist Joe Conason released an excerpt from his upcoming book about Bill Clinton that recounts a 2009 dinner party for Hillary Clinton hosted by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Mr Powell was in attendance, along with other former secretaries including Henry Kissinger and Condoleezza Rice. Separately, Sullivan denied Judicial Watch’s request to depose an official in the State Department’s Freedom of Information Act office, Clarence Finney, but approved their request to depose a former IT official, John Bentel. They were addressed to State Department employees and the State.gov domain.
Olson told Boasberg she could not immediately say how many emails are contained on the rest of the disks or how many might be copies of emails Clinton already has provided.
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Powell’s precedent, such as it is, is no justification for Clinton’s actions with regard to her own private server. According to data from the Census Bureau, in 2001, 50.4 percent of U.S. Households had internet access.
