09-09-2016, 04:49 PM
And of course, what happens to the narrative now? From Media Matters:
Quote:Thanks to the release this week of a January 2009 email from Colin Powell to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, we now know definitively that the former Republican secretary of state advised Clinton on the wisdom of using private emails during her time at the State Department. We know that Powell thought it was fine to use that private email account to bypass State Department servers to communicate with friends and even “foreign leaders.”
We know Powell advised Clinton on how to circumvent federal records requirements while she was secretary of state: “Be very careful. … I got around it all by not saying much and not using systems that captured the data.” We know that while Clinton used private email for convenience, she didn't follow Powell's lead in seeking to deliberately use systems that avoided future public disclosures.
The Republican also complained that State Department officials didn’t want him using his PDA, what he termed an "ancient version" of Clinton's Blackberry: “[T]hey gave me all kinds of nonsense about how they gave out signals and could be read by spies, etc." But Powell said he ignored those warnings and used his PDA in his office suite.
As for the whereabouts of Powell’s own emails from his time at the State Department, “during his tenure, Powell had sent classified emails over his private AOL account - but as of July, had still not responded to a request to contact his service provider to retrieve them,” according to USA Today. “In both 2014 and 2015, the State Department asked Powell to provide all of his records that were not in the agency’s record-keeping system.” As Powell's email to Clinton suggested, he no longer has the emails from his personal account; the records of those communications with national and international leaders during his tenure as secretary of state are gone. (Powell defends the contents of his email to Clinton.)
That limbo status stands in sharp contrast to extraordinary scrutiny the press and Republicans have placed on Clinton’s private account emails, tens of thousands of which she voluntarily turned over to the government and have since been released to the public.
These helpful Powell revelations provide some welcome context to the email story. They also raise questions about how the press will deal with the new information, and why the press has seemed so uninterested in including the context of Powell's actions over the last year-and-a-half as it relentlessly pursued the Clinton email “scandal” story.
Keep in mind that we’ve known for quite a while that Powell used a private email account while serving secretary of state. And since March, we’ve known that Powell "handled classified material on unclassified email systems," according to ABC News, and that some of Powell’s emails contained "information classified at the Secret or Confidential levels.'"