Former secretary of state Colin Powell counselled Hillary Clinton on how best to keep official emails out of public view, according to a leading Democratic lawmaker and close ally of the White House candidate.
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Powell wrote to Clinton in January 2009 that he had “a personal computer that was hooked up to a private phone line” so he could communicate with friends and foreign leaders directly “without it going through the State Department servers”.
US lawmakers said Thursday they will seek to recover the missing emails of Colin Powell from his time as USA secretary of state by going directly to AOL Inc, whose email service he used for his work. They complained the full exchange was not part of earlier email document releases from the department that Republicans in Congress have asked for as part of their probe into Clinton’s email 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.
Powell explained that he had used a dial-up connection (as previously reported, this was a personal AOL account) to send e-mails “so I could communicate with a wide range of friends directly without it going through the State Department servers”.
The main thing to remember is that Powell was not Clinton’s boss, professor, mentor, or instruction-giver, and that his intentional misbehavior does not give sanction to hers.
Clinton’s presidential campaign has been dogged by her own use of a private email server while she was secretary of state – a practice notably different from Powell’s in that she kept the server in the basement of her home.
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.
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton made the following statement regarding newly released documents from the State Department, which were deleted from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s non-state.gov email system and uncovered by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. “If it is public that you have a BlackBerry and it it (sic) government and you are using it, government or not, to do business, it may become an official record and subject to the law”, Powell wrote.
There’s a reason why Powell’s PDA was banned from the State Department’s secure suite. “I’ve been told that the DSS personnel knew you had one and used it but no one fesses up to knowing how you used it!”, she wrote. “Or something embedded in my shoe heel”, Powell said in the email.
But State Department officials’ progress didn’t satisfy Republicans, who couldn’t get answers on why Clinton was allowed to use a private email account, what happened to two BlackBerry devices her aide supposedly smashed with a hammer, and why officials still haven’t divulged Clinton’s calendar requested in 2010 by the Associated Press.
When the Federal Bureau of Investigation declined to charge Clinton one might be lead to think the whole affair was behind her, but among other reasons it hasn’t gone away is that she’s Hillary Clinton and this is an election year.
Powell has denied encouraging Clinton to use a private email server.
In 2014, after the Benghazi probe’s prodding, the department went back to former secretaries and asked them to try to recover any of their emails they did on non-State.gov accounts. Say, as she did about foreign policy in her vote on the war, I’ve learned from my mistakes.
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“There is simply no way that I can deal with every government agency and 275 posts within 20 days”, Kennedy said, referring to the 20-day deadline to produce records under the Freedom of Information Act. He also gave Clinton multiple tips.
