Powell said in a statement Thursday he viewed his use of private email to communicate with foreign leaders and USA officials as private conversations similar to phone calls.
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USA lawmakers said Thursday they will seek to recover the missing emails of Colin Powell from his time as US secretary of state by going directly to AOL Inc, whose email service he used for his work.
Powell’s response, while not excusing Clinton’s cavalier handling of her emails while at State, does add a healthy dose of context.
But Republicans are sure to counter that Colin Powell did warn Hillary Clinton about the problems involved in using private devices and computers for official emails.
“The Republican obsession with Secretary Clinton has reached a fever pitch, and they have been using taxpayer resources to single her out in a desperate and abusive attempt to hurt her presidential campaign”, said Cummings. “I was not aware at the time of any requirement for private, unclassified exchanges to be treated as official records”.
Mrs. Clinton told the Federal Bureau of Investigation that she didn’t follow Mr. Powell’s advice – but her behavior certainly tracks his own.
“It was a very conscious choice”, Chaffetz said of Clinton’s decision to rely on her own server.
Republicans are focusing on Clinton with a series of hearings on her email practices in the weeks leading up to the November 8 election.
“It was a private conversation similar to a phone call”.
He also admitted to going around State Department servers in diplomatic discussions.
“With respect to records, if I sent an email from my public email account to an addressee at another public email account it would not have gone through State Department servers”, Powell said in a statement, according to Politico. “I did the same thing on the road in hotels”.
In addition to the personal computer, Powell said he also used a PDA, or personal digital assistant, a tool that preceded smartphones. “They hated it and asked me to sigh a letter relieving them of responsibility if I got whacked while doing that”. “Same reason they tried to keep mobile phones out of the suite”.
“Her people have been trying to pin it on me”, he told People magazine in August. Or something embedded in my shoe heel. To use a bad analogy, this is the high-ranking gov’t official version of “If your brother said to jump off a bridge, would you do it?” 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!
Clinton also noted that President Obama broke new ground by carrying his own, secure BlackBerry.
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.
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Separately on Wednesday, the House committee’s chairman, Representative Jason Chaffetz, asked the US attorney for the District of Columbia to investigate the apparent deletion in 2015 of an archive of Clinton’s e-mails from her time at the State Department by an employee of Platte River Networks, a firm that managed her private server.
