Colin Powell: No, I Never Told Hillary To Set Up A Private Server

Although Hillary Clinton told the FBI in early July that former Secretary of State Colin Powell advised her to use a personal email account, Powell has offered a statement that denies Clinton’s claim. According to NBC News, on Friday, Powell released a statement through his office that read:

General Powell has no recollection of the dinner conversation. He did write former 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. At the time there was no equivalent system within the Department. He used a secure State computer on his desk to manage classified information.”

In 2009, Clinton asked Powell about his email practices when he was Secretary of State, according to a person who knew of Mr. Powell’s appearance in the documents.

The New York Times, which has seen an advance copy of Joe Conason’s forthcoming book about Bill Clinton’s post-presidency, “Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton,” reports that Conason recalls a conversation between Clinton and Powell at a private party hosted by previous Secretary of State Madeleine Albright when Clinton first assumed the reins at the State Department. Conason writes, “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. 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. Saying that his use of personal email had been transformative for the department.”

Conason continues that Powell “thus confirmed a decision she had made months earlier — to keep her personal account and use it for most messages.”

A State Department inspector general report stated in May that Powell and other senior officials used personal email accounts for official business, but by 2009 the rules had been clarified that acting in such a manner had ben determined dangerous because of “significant security risks.”