Ed Morrissey:
Ah, leadership — the ability to grasp failures, arch one’s back … and blame someone else for them. Hillary Clinton has used the “Colin Powell did it” line ever since the e-mail scandal broke eighteen months ago, even though it’s not actually true. In her FBI interview, the New York Times reports today, Hillary went even further by claiming that Powell told her to use private e-mail for official business:
Pressed by the F.B.I. about her email practices at the State Department, Hillary Clinton told investigators that former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell had advised her to use a personal email account
The account is included in the notes the Federal Bureau of Investigation handed over to Congress on Tuesday, relaying in detail the three-and-a-half-hour interview with Mrs. Clinton in early July that led to the decision by James B. Comey, the bureau’s director, not to pursue criminal charges against her.
Let’s walk this back one step at a time. According to an upcoming book from Joe Conason, Hillary had already started her tenure as Secretary of State when the conversation occurred —months after setting up the private e-mail server and refusing an official State Department account. The conversation took place at a dinner party that also included another former SecState, Madeline Albright:
“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,” Mr. Conason writes. “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.”
Mr. Conason continued, “Saying that his use of personal email had been transformative for the department,” Mr. Powell “thus confirmed a decision she had made months earlier — to keep her personal account and use it for most messages.”
Actually, she used it for all messages, not most. Hillary never got or used an official State Department e-mail account. That is one contrast to Powell; he didn’t routinely use private e-mail for classified work, but instead used the secure State Department system. The reason he used his private e-mail at that time was because State didn’t yet have a central unclassified e-mail system — an issue that had long been resolved in the four years between the tenures of Powell and Hillary at State.
Powell objected to Hillary’s characterization in a statement this morning:
https://twitter.com/BraddJaffy/status/766623945005080576
Finally, Powell didn’t set up a server in his house for his official communications. He used a commercially available service for his e-mails, and disclosed his use of it widely — even including it in his memoirs. Hillary hid the existence of this system, allowing her to duck legitimate Congressional and judicial oversight into the State Department.
And some people will trust her with our country. Is there anything she would not lie about?
Powell has ‘no recollection’ of Clinton email dinner conversation
@Wordsmith:
Oh no, then that would mean Hillary was lying. Gee, I’m surprised.
@Wordsmith: Interesting article, Wordsmith.
It is too bad Judicial Watch won’t get to depose Hillary.
They must put their questions in written form and accept her answers without any ability to do follow-ups.
Sad, she can twist words and equivocate like no one else.
@Nanny G: I see she has been ordered to answer their questions.
@Nanny G, #4:
Who is Judicial Watch that they should get to depose anybody?
Maybe the FBI has it?
The Bush administration made extensive use of non-governmental RNC servers to conduct official business, which mysteriously flew south with a couple of million emails potentially relevant to half-a-dozen ongoing investigations. The hypocrisy level is totally off the charts.
@Greg:
They are a group that filed a lawsuit against a public official that they wanted certain information that was paid for by tax dollars. The Federal judge ruled they were entitled to have that public information and ordered her to answer the questions. Don’t you agree that public figures being paid with your dollars are accountable for their actions? Or do you think only Republicans are obligated to answer questions?
@Greg:
So funny, remember your argument just above where you said that just because Obama ran up the deficit 10 T is not a reason to allow Trump to do the same. Here you are now saying that just because someone in the Bush Admin used private servers that makes it okay for shrillary to do the same. You’re going to have to get a file system where you quit repeating the same mistakes over and over.
@Redteam, #8:
If Clinton had foreseen the problems that would follow, she probably have decided against using a private server. But that decision was made in the past. What happened in the past can’t be altered..
Running up another $10 trillion in debt is what experts are warning will happen in the future, if Donald Trump is allowed to put his fiscally irresponsible tax plan into effect.
Presumably you understand there’s a fundamental difference between hindsight and foresight.
@Greg:
I’ll agree that her judgment is piss poor. It is Dimocrats predicting the debt would climb under Trump and the Repubs say it would climb even more under Clinton. If history is an indicator, the Dims have run up more deficit in the last 8 years than all the years of the federal government, under Republicans, since the country began. So if you’re concerned as to whether we get a proven deficit government in Dims, or just one the Dims think we might get, though not based on any actual events, then you will surely be voting Repub.
@Redteam, #10:
As piss poor as that of the candidate who made this guy his campaign manager? Did the Donald look at Manafort’s resume? It must have been interesting reading:
All of which is well documented. At this point we can only speculate about possible connections with Vladimir Putin.
Manafort has since been fired, of course, and replaced by Stephen K. Bannon, media nemesis of the GOP establishment. Forget about any republican party unity. That was like a formal declaration that you’re about to make a hostile takeover attempt.
@Greg:
Why is getting 12 million from Ukraine a big deal? The Clinton’s have gotten over 200 million illicitly, and you don’t think that’s a big deal. Much of it for selling uranium to Russia.
Do you have two standards, Greg?
The big deal is who he was promoting in the Ukraine to get it. Viktor Yanukovych is not exactly a Ukrainian national hero. He was a Putin puppet. His personal worth is estimated to be around $12 billion—not a bad accumulation, on a politician’s salary. Around $70 billion of public money was transferred out to foreign accounts during his tenure. He’s now hiding out in Russia, following a series of criminal investigations.
Manafort has a long history of representing seriously bad actors.
@Greg:
Not nearly as long a history as Shrillary does.
Wanna make a bet on how much went to the Clinton Foundation? I’ll bet it is more than 12.7 million.
The good thing about this is that if something is questionable, Trump takes care of it. All Hillary does is lie and make excuses.
Have you read, word by word, what Hillary Clinton said to the FBI about the advice Colin Powell gave her concerning the use of a non-governmental email server?
Right. And neither has Ed Morrissey. Nor has anybody else, outside of a few Congressional representatives who were given confidential interview notes to examine. And what they got wasn’t a verbatim transcript, because the FBI doesn’t record interviews or make verbatim transcripts.
As usual, you think you know something when you really don’t know squat. Somebody has told yo what to think. You’ve been given another conclusion, without anything to support it.
@Greg: The only problem being that Colin Powell did not use a private server and never told Shrillary that she should do so. Other than that………….
@Redteam: I hope you had nothing more critical to do than respond to Greg’s ignorant posts. He is unable to follow the threads of an argument. He always pulls a Clinton by blaming someone else. He never compares apples to apples. I hope you do not mind wasting your time replying to a stump!
There is no evidence that Hillary Clinton’s private email server was ever hacked. That’s more than can be said for the State Department’s own official email system.
@Randy:
You give Greg too much credit. He hasn’t worked up to “stump’ level yet. He’s still at ‘beginner’.
@Greg:
Now that kind of response will get you up to ‘stump’ level a little quicker.
Seems some confusion.
Hillary falsely claimed Colin Powell said it was OK to use private Email (not a private SERVER) when communicating with friends, family, non-State things.
But Colin never told her to set up a private SERVER in her own home.
He meant just an email like we all have.
He also never meant for her to use such an email acct for OFFICIAL State business.
We are straying away from this.
@Nanny G: Nancy, that’s what I understand. It’s ‘stumpy’ that’s having the problem.
Trump’s campaign computers were also hacked. You just don’t hear much about it because nothing that can be categorized as intelligence could found anywhere on his computer system.
@Greg:
Now I know where you’re getting your information from.