The email, dated two days after Clinton took office in 2009, suggests how Clinton could use a personal device while avoiding her messages being archived as part of the federal record. “If it is public that you have a Blackberry”, he said, “it may become an official record and subject to the law”.
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In his email to Clinton, Powell did warn her about the potential for her personal emails to become public.
“I got around it all by not saying much and not using systems that captured the data”, he said.
Powell has said that his use of a private email account was different than Clinton’s use of a private emails server in her home.
Still, Moss said, the exchange offers circumstantial evidence that Clinton “knew how to minimize her exposure to records retention”. Clinton’s aide Huma Abedin told the FBI Clinton would retrieve the BlackBerry and leave the secure area when she wanted to check email. “I did the same thing on the road in hotels”.
In Powell’s case, however, it is known that his private email account was eventually breached. Chaffetz also has asked Justice to review whether emails were illegally deleted from Clinton’s private server. While it’s clear Powell used a private server to go around the State Department, Powell also did communicate over the State servers and maintained a State email account. Yet then-head of diplomatic security Eric Boswell told FBI investigators he’d never received any complaints about Clinton’s Blackberry use.
As a 2009 email exchange from Powell to his successor, Hillary Clinton, about use of private email at the State Department made headlines Wednesday, some keen observers found humor in an unrelated portion of Powell’s memo.
The FBI’s report on Clinton’s email use includes information about Powell’s warning to Clinton that using a government email meant her messages would become public.
Clinton has previously said she was advised by Powell he used a non-government AOL account to communicate with staff and world leaders, and intentionally kept it hidden in order to skirt burdensome State Department regulations about document retention. I had an ancient version of a PDA and used it. According to The Wall Street Journal, Powell told Clinton that he used a personal computer to conduct government business and took steps to ensure his digital correspondence wasn’t “going through the State Department servers”. He said the department is now sorting through thousands of records it received from the FBI following its investigation of Clinton.
Clinton thanked Powell “for all of the advice about berries, security and life on the 7th floor!”
The controversy over Clinton’s email server has followed the Democratic presidential nominee the past 18 months on the campaign trail.
She used a Blackberry to send email, and kept all of her email communications private for her entire tenure at the department, only turning them over after being prodded by the congressional probe into the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack.
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Last Night Clinton Said Classified Material “Is Designated” And “Is Marked” Via “A Header”.
