Yes, Collin Powell, former U.S. general, did use a private email while he was Secretary of State, but it was at a time when the State Department did not have its own secure server. Now Hillary Clinton’s latest excuse for her notorious use of a private server is that Powell made her do it.
According to Collin Powell, Mrs. Clinton “was using [the private email server] for a year before I sent her a memo telling her what I did. … Her people have been trying to pin it on me.”
The WSJ reports that Mr. Powell’s goal in using a private server, as he explains in his 2012 memoir, was “to send a message to the bureaucracy about improving State Department technology.” By contrast, Hillary Clinton’s goal in using a private server has been to hide emails from federal disclosure laws.
These latest emails are further evidence that Mrs. Clinton set up her private server to prevent the public from seeing how Hillary and Bill mixed public power with their personal financial and political ambitions via the family foundation. When she got caught, Mrs. Clinton cherry-picked the emails she’d turn over to State and tried to destroy the rest. Meanwhile, everyone important in the world understood that a gift to the Clinton Foundation was a way to influence the U.S. government.
In a related article in the WSJ, William McGurn points out that voters are asked to believe that “it was somehow an accident that so many of the millions former President Bill Clinton raked in from speaking fees would come from companies, countries or people who had business before a State Department run by his wife. The truth is, this was inevitable under the Clinton Foundation business model. And it beggars belief to think all these dollars were being given out without an expectation of something in return.”
