He also explained to Clinton that the State Department would not let him use a Blackberry in secure spaces.
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An email sent to Hillary Clinton by her predecessor as secretary of state, Colin Powell, detailed ways he circumvented State Department protocol by using a private email address.
“Be very careful”, warned Powell.
“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.
The emails were provided by Democratic Congressman Elijah Cummings.
The main attack on Hillary Clinton for keeping a private email account while at the State Department is that this may have caused breaches in national security.
He also admitted to going around State Department servers in diplomatic discussions.
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. “When I asked why not they gave me all kinds of nonsense about how they gave out signals and could be read by spies, etc”.
Still, Moss said, the exchange offers circumstantial evidence that Clinton “knew how to minimize her exposure to records retention”. It “also illustrates the longstanding problem that no secretary of State ever used an official unclassified email account until the current secretary of State”, said Cummings.
A Clinton campaign spokesman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, and Powell couldn’t be reached by e-mail or through a call to his personal aide after business hours.
“What were the restrictions on your use of your blackberry?” she asked Powell, in an email dated January 23, 2009.
In Powell’s case, however, it is known that his private email account was eventually breached.
Clinton told the Federal Bureau of Investigation that Powell’s note didn’t factor into her decision to use a private server, but has defended her use of private email by noting that Powell used it as well while at State.
The hacker then leaked emails Powell exchanged with a female Romanian diplomat with whom he carried on years of personal correspondence after meeting while he was secretary of state. “I got around it by not saying much and not using systems that capture the data”. “She said her personal attorneys reviewed all work related emails but they did not”, comparing the “gaps” in Clinton’s emails to the “Grand Canyon”.
Clinton told the FBI, which investigated the matter and found no criminal wrongdoing, that Powell had advised her to use the server, though he denied he was responsible in an East Hampton interview with PEOPLE last month, and said “her people have been trying to pin it on me”.
“Her people are trying to pin it on me”, Powell said last month.
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The email exchange indicates Powell wanted the State Department to loosen its technological restrictions, though he ran into obstacles in doing so.
