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The Latest On The Hillary Clinton Email Story: Emails From Collin Powell Admit He Did The Same Thing

By Reggie Reiner
Published on: 22:11 PST, Sep 7, 2016

The scandal surrounding the Hillary Clinton emails from a private server that she used when serving as President Obama’s Secretary of State just got a whole lot more interesting. The Democratic Party has decided to dump a bunch of the Clinton emails which purport to show that none other than the Republican former Secretary of State Colin Powell advised Hillary on how to use her email servers.

The emails revealed that former Secretary of State Colin Powell admitted to Hillary that he used a private server for communicating with family and friends alike and his own personal computer even for official work related emails, CNN and everyone else has reported.

The Democrats revealed this information in the hope that it would put a rest to the many criticisms of Hillary Clinton for using her private emails for government business, including communications that may have been classified as secret.

Congressman Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the senior Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, was the one who released the emails.

In his email correspondence with Clinton, Colin Powell told his successor in the State Department that he had 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 went on to confess that he also communicated with foreign dignitaries outside of the secure State Department servers saying, “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.”

The main attack on Hillary Clinton for keeping a private email account while at the State Department is that this may have caused breaches in national security. It has also drawn speculation that there may have been many a Clinton email that she had cause to want to keep out of the reach of Congressional oversight.

It has further been revealed that Hillary Clinton staffers had destroyed mobile devices, including two Blackberries, on which she sent and received emails. Critics say that this was done as part of a cover up while Democrats say that this showed responsibility on the part of Clinton by ensuring that any classified data on the devices could not be recovered by the wrong people.

The latest in the Clinton email hullabaloo comes as both Presidential candidates appeared in a public forum hosted by NBC’s Matt Lauer.

Colin Powell had the following to say in his email to Hillary Clinton about the electronic devices which were used for email communications.

“Now, the real issue had to do with PDAs, as we called them a few years ago before BlackBerry became a noun. And the issue was DS would not allow them into the secure spaces, especially up your way. 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. I had numerous meetings with them. We even opened one up for them to try to explain to me why it was more dangerous than say, a remote control for one of the many tvs in the suite. Or something embedded in my shoe heel.”

“They never satisfied me and NSA/CIA wouldn’t back off. So, we just went about our business and stopped asking. I had an ancient version of a PDA and used it. In general, the suite was so sealed that it is hard to get signals in or out wirelessly.”

So the Hillary Clinton Presidential campaign will surely point to this as a validation of what they have been saying about the Clinton emails all along. Hillary Clinton’s supporters have been asking what the big deal was about the whole email issue anyway.

But Republicans are sure to counter that Colin Powell did warn Hillary Clinton about the problems involved in using private devices and computers for official emails. Powell told Clinton that there “is a real danger” with their use. “If it is public that you have a BlackBerry and you are using it, government or not, to do business, it may become an official record and subject to the law,” Powell warned. “Be very careful. I got around it all by not saying much and not using systems that captured the data,” he explained to Clinton.

Representative Cummings released a statement along with the emails saying, “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, although Secretary Clinton has made clear that she did not rely on this advice.”

Cummings also took the opportunity to slam Republicans over having made such a big deal over Hillary Clinton’s emails.

“If Republicans were truly concerned with transparency, strengthening FOIA, and preserving federal records, they would be attempting to recover Secretary Powell’s emails from AOL, but they have taken no steps to do so despite the fact that this period—including the run-up to the Iraq War—was critical to our nation’s history.”

The problem for Hillary Clinton and the Democrats is that Colin Powell has stated himself that he only spoke on the email issue with Hillary Clinton at least a year after she took office and was already using a private email server.

Powell told People Magazine last month, “Her people have been trying to pin it on me. The truth is, she was using [the private email server] for a year before I sent her a memo telling her what I did.”

When the 79-year-old former general was asked why he thought that Hillary Clinton was implying that he advised her on the use of a private email server, Powell responded, “Why do you think? It doesn’t bother me. But it’s okay. I’m free.”

This will not be the end of the Hillary Clinton email scandal. But the real issue is whether or not the voters care about it with only 60 days to go until the election.

[Photo by Andrew Harnik/AP Images]

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