Confirms offering her private email tips; Republican Powell voting Clinton

(Bloomberg) — Former Secretary of State Colin Powell gave Hillary Clinton blunt advice about skirting the rules on using personal e-mail when she started work at the State Department, saying he used a private account on a personal computer to communicate with everyone from friends to foreign leaders.

‘What were your restrictions on your use of your blackberry?” Clinton asked in an e-mail to Powell on Jan. 23, 2009. “Did you use it in your personal office?” She said she heard that diplomatic security personnel “knew you had one and used it but no one fesses up to knowing how you used it!”

“I didn’t have a BlackBerry,” Powell responded. “What I did do was have a personal computer that was hooked up to a private phone line (sounds ancient.) So I could communicate with a wide range of friends directly without going through the State Department servers. I even used it to do business with some foreign leaders and some of the senior folks in the Department on their personal email accounts. I did the same thing on the road in hotels.”

The e-mail from Powell, who was the top U.S. diplomat under Republican President George W. Bush, was released Wednesday by a Democratic lawmaker as part of his party’s efforts to rebut Republican assertions that Clinton should be prosecuted for handling sensitive matters on a personal e-mail system.

Portions of Powell’s advice were cited in a summary the FBI released last week on its investigation into Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server during her four years as secretary of state. FBI Director James Comey found earlier that Clinton and her aides were “extremely careless” in handling sensitive government communications but didn’t recommend prosecution.