Retired Gen. Colin Powell appears to be frustrated that Hillary Clinton has used him as cover to defend her State Department email practices.
“Her people have been trying to pin it on me,” Powell, who served as secretary of state in the George W. Bush administration, told The New York Post’s Page Six.
Powell made the comments days after it was reported that Clinton told the FBI during her interrogation last month that her predecessor twice advised her to use a personal email account as secretary of state.
According to a forthcoming book from Joe Conason, a rabid Clinton supporter, Powell offered Clinton the advice to use a personal account while at a dinner party hosted by former secretary of state Madeleine Albright in early 2009, months into Clinton’s tenure.
NBC News reported on Friday that Clinton shared the same story with FBI investigators. Powell issued a statement on Friday saying that he had “no recollection” of the dinner party exchange. Clinton’s claim has yet to be verified by other dinner party attendees, a list which included former secretaries of state Condoleezza Rice and Henry Kissinger.
Clinton also reportedly told the FBI during her three-and-a-half hour July 2 interrogation that Powell advised her in a 2009 email exchange to use a personal account.
But Powell told The Post that he sent that email well after Clinton had already started using her off-the-books setup.
“The truth is she was using it (her personal email) for a year before I sent her a memo telling her what I did [during my term as Secretary of State],” said Powell, who, according to The Post, appeared angered by the email situation.
The Post’s report continues:
When asked why Clinton’s team were attempting to blame him, he responded, “Why do you think?”
Despite appearing angered by the situation, he added, “It doesn’t bother me. It’s okay, I’m free.”
While Clinton has regularly pointed to Powell’s use of a personal email account to defend her email use, there are major differences between the two former diplomats’ email setups. Powell said he used the State Department’s classified network to send and receive emails containing classified information.
Clinton never used a computer hooked up to that network. Instead, she sent and received all of her emails on her personal BlackBerry, which was hooked up to an email server housed at her home in New York. More than 100 of those emails contained information that was classified when they were sent or received.
Clinton also paid a State Department employee under the table to manage her email system. Powell merely used a commercial email account.