Commentary: The (likely) real story behind Colin Powell’s email advice to Hillary Clinton

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell blamed Hillary Clinton for “trying to pin” her email scandal on him.

Earlier last week, the New York Times, citing FBI notes from an interview with Hillary Clinton and an upcoming book, reported during a dinner conversation in 2009, Powell advised Clinton to use a personal email account as an efficient way to communicate. Powell says he has no recollection of the conversation, though he did write Clinton an email after she started using her private email server, describing his limited use of a personal AOL email account.

The media on this story missed the context, and simply played it as a he said-she said piece. Here's the likely full story.

The Full Story

What was almost certainly in the email Powell sent Clinton was the story of his successful efforts to drag the State Department into the modern age. I worked for State during that period of time, and watched it happen.

When the rest of the world was working on PCs and using then-modern software in their offices, State clung to an old, clunky mainframe system made by the now-defunct company WANG. WANG's version of a word processor was only a basic text editor with no font or formatting tools. Spell check was an option many locations did not have installed. IBM had bid on a contract to move State to PCs in 1990, but was rejected in favor of a renewal of the WANG mainframes.

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