Hillary Clinton’s private email usage during her time at the State Department continues to trail her campaign. On Wednesday, House Democrats, led by Rep. Elijah Cummings released an email exchange between Clinton and former Secretary of State Colin Powell showing that Clinton’s usage wasn’t all that different from Powell’s. In the exchange, Clinton seeks out advice on how to continue to use her Blackberry once taking office as secretary of state. Clinton’s email to Powell is dated Jan. 23, 2009.
Powell’s response, while not excusing Clinton’s cavalier handling of her emails while at State, does add a healthy dose of context. Namely, Powell acted pretty similarly to Clinton. “I didn’t have a Blackberry,” Powell writes in the email. “What I did do was have a personal computer that was hooked up to a private phone line (sounds ancient.) So I could communicate with a wide range of friends directly without it going through the State Department servers. I even used it to do business with some foreign leaders and some of the senior folks in the Department on their personal email accounts. I did the same thing on the road in hotels.”
Powell goes on to describe ignoring NSA and CIA prohibitions on using PDAs in secure areas, saying: “When I asked why not they gave me all kinds of nonsense about how they gave out signals and could be read by spies, etc. Same reason they tried to keep mobile phones out of the suite … we just went about our business and stopped asking.” The email obviously does not get into the nitty-gritty of whether the correspondence Powell conducted through his personal account included classified material, but it does show that Clinton’s email usage was not totally out of line from that of her predecessors in the job. It doesn’t totally smooth out all the questions of disclosure required by the Federal Records Act, but it does shed light on a different, far more naïve culture of email usage in the aughts, even among high ranking American officials.
Here’s the remainder of Powell’s email (minus a sentence or so that gets cut off):
