Right around the time Hillary Clinton was again being roasted about her handling of classified material at the Commander-in-Chief Forum on NBC Wednesday night, an email released by Rep. Elijah Cummings, the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, was making the rounds on social media.
Breaking: Colin Powell told Hillary Clinton he took steps to avoid 'going through the State Department servers' https://t.co/Fi9QKBeXyL ?
— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) September 8, 2016
Clinton had told the FBI that former Secretary of State Colin Powell had advised her at a dinner party hosted by Madeline Albright to maintain a separate email address for personal communications.
Powell shut off questions about that “so-called dinner” pretty quickly, but House Democrats revived the subject with an email exchange between Powell and Clinton two days after she was appointed in which Powell revealed how he “got around” restrictions on carrying a PDA at the State Department.
House Dems just released email that Colin Powell sent to Hillary Clinton about using personal email at State. pic.twitter.com/CqSXwd3Lf8
— Rebecca Shabad (@RebeccaShabad) September 7, 2016
“What I did do was have a personal computer that was hooked up to a private phone line … so I could communicate with a wide range of friends directly without it going through the State Department servers,” Powell wrote to Clinton. As far as restrictions on using a BlackBerry or PDA, Powell wrote that he “got around it all by not saying much and not using systems that captured the data.”
The full back and forth between Hillary Clinton and Colin Powell is here. And wow. pic.twitter.com/jHKpEbTS8W
— Matt Viser (@mviser) September 7, 2016
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This. This is why Emails as gov't records matter. https://t.co/NXk4IEiAbW
— Joseph Trevithick (@FranticGoat) September 8, 2016
Shhh … don’t let Vox hear you. They’d rather not know.
So, Colin Powell is terrible. https://t.co/dS37ak9iUV
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) September 8, 2016
Are people just now realizing Colin Powell is self-serving and unreliable? https://t.co/c2oKDrDFTb
— John Ford (@JohnDouglasFord) September 8, 2016
So Hillary Clinton told the truth about Colin Powell's advice, and Powell lied. https://t.co/YCZY7VUtsl
— Josh Kraushaar (@HotlineJosh) September 8, 2016
It looks like it, with the caveat that there’s no mention of a dinner party or the setting up of a home-brew email server. But Powell’s warning that the State Department’s security precautions would drive Clinton crazy is just a terrible look for everyone involved.
Wow. Colin Powell really HATED his State Dept security detail. https://t.co/c1DMJtPrrE
— Steven Portnoy (@stevenportnoy) September 8, 2016
Politics aside, this exchange reads: Mom says I'm grounded & can't use my phone but I'm TOTALLY using my old one! xo https://t.co/dpwJ3CC9pK
— Erin Geiger Smith (@erin_gs) September 8, 2016
“This email exchange shows that Secretary Powell advised Secretary Clinton with a detailed blueprint on how to skirt security rules and bypass requirements to preserve federal records,” Cummings said in a statement, “although Secretary Clinton has made clear that she did not rely on this advice.”
That’s true; Clinton went far beyond Powell’s methods and set up a private server, though which she sent all of her email, skirting the government system entirely.
And the bus is now backing up. The best part is Colin Powell threw the GOP under the bus for these people. https://t.co/Vp3Ng0heNJ
— Brnt Brtn, CP (@Bburtcpa) September 8, 2016
So, this email released by Rep. Elijah Cummings … clears Hillary Clinton somehow?
https://twitter.com/Beamin4Trump/status/773691879154184198
This is interesting — but Clinton’s domain was registered 10 days earlier. https://t.co/s5MiK97Gkr
— Philip Bump (@pbump) September 8, 2016
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