Colin Powell defended his use of private email Thursday after Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released an exchange between him and Hillary Clinton in which he advised her on ways to skirt State Department’s diplomatic security rules.
“Secretary Clinton has stated that she was not influenced by my email in making her decisions on email use,” Powell said in a statement. “I was not trying to influence her but just to explain what I had done eight years earlier to begin the transformation of the State Department’s information system.” In his Jan. 2009 email to Clinton, Powell warned Clinton that her emails could become federal records if the administration learned about the existence of her server.
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“[T]here is a real danger. 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. “Be very careful. I got around it all by not saying much and not using systems that captured the data.”
The former Republican secretary of state said he had been interviewed by the FBI and State Department’s inspector general and added that he “stand[s] by” the decision to use a personal device for official communication.
Powell’s statement echoed a frequent defense from Clinton in which she has claimed she believed most of her emails were captured by the State Department’s servers when she wrote to individuals on their official accounts.
“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. It was a private conversation similar to a phone call. If I sent it to a state.gov address it should have been captured and retained by State servers,” Powell said. “I was not aware at the time of any requirement for private, unclassified exchanges to be treated as official records.”
The statement was first reported by Politico.
