Colin Powell Denies He Had Conversation With Hillary Clinton About Private Email
According to notes provided to Congress by the FBI, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton claimed that former Secretary of State Colin Powell had advised her to rely on a private email address for nonclassified communication.
The conversation supposedly took place during a 2009 dinner party at the home of Madeleine Albright. According to Clinton, Powell discussed the multiple benefits of using private email to handle certain work-related tasks.
The New York Times reported on the conversation Thursday, citing an excerpt from an upcoming book by journalist Joe Conason titled Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton.
“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,” Conason wrote. “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.”
But on Friday, Powell said that no such conversation regarding the usage of private email to conduct business had taken place.
“General Powell has no recollection of the dinner conversation,” the former secretary of state’s office said in a statement.
Powell’s office did clarify that at one point he sent an email to Clinton describing the benefits of using personal email for certain intradepartmental communications.
“He did write Secretary Clinton an email memo describing his use of his personal AOL email account for unclassified messages and how it vastly improved communications within the State Department,” the statement said.
Clinton has referred to Powell in order to justify setting up her own email server. But the differences between the two are stark: Powell used a commercial account while Clinton set up a private network, and Powell sent only two emails that were retroactively classified at the lowest level, while Clinton sent more than 1,000 that were classified.
House Republicans have officially requested that the Department of Justice investigate whether Clinton committed perjury while testifying before Congress about the email scandal.
Among other things, they cite her claim that “there was nothing marked classified on my emails, either sent or received.”
FBI Director James Comey said last month that some of the emails found on Clinton’s private server were in fact marked that they contained classified information and were so marked at the time they were handled by Clinton.
Although the FBI did not recommend that Clinton be prosecuted, Comey rebuked her for her extremely careless handling of classified information. (For more from the author of “Colin Powell Denies He Had Conversation With Hillary Clinton About Private Email” please click HERE)
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