“I didn’t have a Blackberry”, Powell writes in the email.
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He told her that he did not have a BlackBerry but instead used a personal computer hooked up to a private phone line to “communicate with a wide range of friends directly without it going through the State Department servers”.
In February, the State Department revealed that Powell received a dozen emails in his personal account that were later deemed classified or confidential while he was secretary of state in the George W. Bush administration. “I did the same thing on the road in hotels”, he added.
Clinton’s emails are expected to continue to be an issue ahead of the November election, and the House Oversight Committee is expected to concentrate on it during a hearing Thursday. Cummings said he procured the documents through a procedure that allows members of the committee to obtain federal records. He also gave Clinton tips on how to get around the security that was on offer since “their job is to keep you hermetically sealed up”. Chaffetz said at a hearing Thursday that Clinton “conveniently created” a chaotic system that is costing millions of dollars to fix.
All records concerning, regarding the January 2009 memorandum from Undersecretary for Management Patrick F. Kennedy entitled “Memorandum for All Under Secretaries, Assistant Secretaries, Executive Directors and Post Management Officers: Preserving Electronically the Email of Senior Officials Upon Their Departure”. Powell goes on to describe his frustrations with the N.S.A. and the C.I.A. over communication and security protocols, but dismissed their reasoning.
The report provided only a few sentences from the Powell email.
Powell said he “had numerous meetings with them…” “Her people have been trying to pin it on me”, Powell said in August. “Or something embedded in my shoe heel”, Powell said in the email.
“‘What were your restrictions on your use of your blackberry?” Powell told Clinton that there “is a real danger” with their use. Reading about the President’s [BlackBerry] rules this morning, it sounds like it won’t be as useful as it used to be.
As it turned out, Powell didn’t actually use a BlackBerry, but had a much more complicated system to get around the inconvenience of following the rules. Cummings, a Democrat from Maryland, points out that email practices at the state department were notoriously lax until recently, and that the email exchange between Clinton and Powell “illustrates the longstanding problem that no Secretary of State ever used an official unclassified email account until the current Secretary of State”.
Portions of Powell’s advice were cited in a summary the FBI released last week on its investigation into Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server during her four years as secretary of state. Wasn’t it Colin Powell who just a few weeks ago couldn’t recall what he told Clinton about using email?
Republicans are focusing on Clinton with a series of hearings on her email practices in the weeks leading up to the November 8 election.
“Government or not, to do business, it may become an official record and subject to the law”, he said.
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The latest twist in the ongoing story is Cummings’ release of early-2009 emails between Powell and Clinton.
