Friday, the New York Times reported Hillary told FBI investigators that fellow former Secretary of State, Colin Powell, advised her to use a private email account.
24 hours later and Powell is all, “nah, brah.”
Speaking to People Magazine, Powell said Hillary’s people were trying to use him as an email flub scapegoat:
“Her people have been trying to pin it on me,” Powell, 79, told PEOPLE Saturday night at the Apollo in the Hamptons 2016 Night of Legends fête in East Hampton, New York. “The truth is, she was using [the private email server] for a year before I sent her a memo telling her what I did,” Powell added. Why does the former diplomat believe this to be the case? “Why do you think?” he said. “It doesn’t bother me. But it’s okay; I’m free.”
“I’m free.”
In the NYT report, Clinton cited a dinner conversation with Powell as justification for her private email account usage:
The journalist Joe Conason first reported the conversation between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Powell in his coming book about Bill Clinton’s postpresidency, “Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton,” which The Times received an advanced copy of.Mr. Conason describes a conversation in the early months of Mrs. Clinton’s tenure at the State Department at a small dinner party hosted by Madeleine Albright, another former secretary of state, at her home in Washington. Henry Kissinger and Condoleezza Rice also attended.“Toward the end of the evening, over dessert, Albright asked all of the former secretaries to offer one salient bit of counsel to the nation’s next top diplomat,” Mr. Conason writes. “Powell told her to use her own email, as he had done, except for classified communications, which he had sent and received via a State Department computer.”Mr. Conason continued, “Saying that his use of personal email had been transformative for the department,” Mr. Powell “thus confirmed a decision she had made months earlier — to keep her personal account and use it for most messages.”
Powell’s camp immediately released a statement saying he had zero recollection of the aforementioned conversation, but that he had sent a memo outlining his use of a personal email account. At the time, there was no State Department system available to accommodate Powell’s email usage like there was when Clinton assumed the role of Secretary of State.
A key detail Hillary keeps overlooking? Powell did not use his personal email account to share classified information. He had a separate State Department run computer and account for that.
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