Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the ranking member on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said the exchange clearly showed Powell advising Clinton on how to get around record-preservation rules. But after reading this exchange, it seems Powell got off easy. In March of 2015, Powell said during an appearance on ABC’s This Week that he no longer had emails from his personal account: “I do not have thousands of pages somewhere in my personal files”, he said. He said the department is now sorting through thousands of records it received from the FBI following its investigation of Clinton. He mentioned that he also did the same thing while he was on the road.
Advertisement
State Department Deputy Spokesperson Mark Toner said Wednesday: “I am not able to provide insight into what former Secretary Powell meant in this email chain”.
The hacker also accessed Powell’s Facebook account, sending out posts under the former secretary of state’s name stating “You will burn in hell, Bush!” and “Kill the illuminati!”
The decision came a few minutes after U.S. State Department officials testified in a hearing that the department never contacted AOL to recover the missing records, despite repeated requests by the National Archives and Records Administration over the a year ago. Clinton’s emails were also deleted and classified, which is a major security issue.
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”. “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”.
Powell, in his reply, said he didn’t have a Blackberry, but used a personal computer hooked up to a private phone line to communicate with friends and world leaders “without it going through the State Department servers”.
“I refused to let them live in my house or build a place on my property”, he added.
Republicans rejected the comparison with Powell, saying Clinton told the FBI during its investigation that his advice had no bearing on her decision to use a private server. Her defenders have pointed to some similarities in Powell’s earlier use of private email, which drew fresh scrutiny at Thursday’s hearing.
Advertisement
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. “If it is public that you have a BlackBerry and it … government and you are using it, government or not, to do business, it may become an official record and subject to the law”. To me, Powell’s note is tantamount to admission of a crime and Hillary’s reaction was that she thought that particular crime seemed like a fine idea. He said he didn’t have a Blackberry, and but said he brought an ancient PDA into his office.
