Yes, Powell did use personal e-mail in his time as SoS. This is referenced in the NYT article. The law was changed to make that a no-no. 

Just Fred wrote:

When was the law changed in relation to this flap?

Wasn't much of a flap at the time....

From Politico

Like Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State Colin Powell also used a personal email account during his tenure at the State Department, an aide confirmed in a statement. “He was not aware of any restrictions nor does he recall being made aware of any over the four years he served at State,” the statement says. “He sent emails to his staff generally via their State Department email addresses. These emails should be on the State Department computers. He might have occasionally used personal email addresses, as he did when emailing to family and friends.” .....The statement continues: “He did not take any hard copies of emails with him when he left office and has no record of the emails. They were all unclassified and mostly of a housekeeping nature. He came into office encouraging the use of emails as a way of getting the staff to embrace the new 21st information world.” “The account he used has been closed for a number of years. In light of new policies published in 2013 and 2014 and a December 2014 letter from the State Department advising us of these polices, we will be working with the department to see if any additional action is required on our part.” Clinton allies have maintained that the presumed Democratic presidential front-runner’s use of a personal email account was not out of step with how former secretaries used email to conduct work related to the State Department. “Like Secretaries of State before her, she used her own email account when engaging with any Department officials,” said Nick Merrill, spokesman for Clinton, in a statement. “For government business, she emailed them on their Department accounts, with every expectation they would be retained. When the Department asked former Secretaries last year for help ensuring their emails were in fact retained, we immediately said yes.”

Regardless of whether it was Powell or Clinton, or whomever, I'm blown away that personal e-mail accounts used for State Department business would be considered standard operating procedure.


 

Given that the Clinton's know that the political Right have always cast them in a suspicious light, why would Hillary do something like this?

It's just fuel for the fire.

Let's back up the train ya'll as it may turn out that the rules Hillary is supossed to have brokenmay not have existed during her time as Secretary of State

The new regs apparently weren’t fully implemented by State until a year and half after Clinton left State. Here’s the timeline: Clinton left the State Department on February 1, 2013. Back in 2011, President Obama had signed a memorandum directing the update of federal records management. But the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) didn’t issue the relevant guidance, declaring that email records of senior government officials are permanent federal records, until August 2013. Then, in September 2013, NARA issued guidance on personal email use. 

A senior State Department official emailed me to say that “in October 2014, a Department-wide notice was sent out which explained each employee’s responsibilities for records management. Consistent with 2013 NARA guidance, it included instructions that generally employees should not use personal email for the transaction of government business, but that in the very limited circumstances when it is necessary, all records must be forwarded to a government account or otherwise preserved in the Department’s electronic records systems.” 

So if these new regulations went into effect after she left State, then what rule did she violate, exactly? And, if this is true, why did the Times not share this rather crucial piece of information with its readers? No one could possibly argue that this fact isn’t germane to the story. It’s absolutely central to it. Why would the Times leave it out? 

So what, exactly, did she do wrong here? Maybe something—I’m not saying she’s totally in the clear. She and her people still should answer the question: Why no government email address at all? What would have been the good and straightforward reason for not having one? It’s a little too early to know exactly what the facts are, and how culpable Clinton is here of any possible wrongdoing. But of course it’s not too early for people to read the Times story and start making noise about a “pattern” of Clinton behavior that this falls into. Maybe.

But this seems like a good time to remember another pattern of behavior: namely, that of the Times. I remember clear as a bell reading that initial Jeff Gerth story on Whitewater back in March 1992. It seemed devastating. It took many millions of dollars and many years and many phony allegations before important parts of Gerth’s reporting were debunked. But they were. The Clintons did nothing wrong on Whitewater except to be naïve enough to let themselves by chiseled by Jim McDougal. 

If they had done something wrong, with all the prosecutorial firepower thrown at them by a prosecutor (Ken Starr) who clearly hated them, don’t you think they’d have been indicted? Of course they would have been. But Starr couldn’t turn anything up on Whitewater and was about to close down his investigation empty-handed until he got wind of a gal named Monica. So that’s a pattern too.

The Times, for those with short memories, has never loved the Clintons. Remember Howell Raines and his ceaseless, thundering editorials against them. And today, it smells like the Times may have been rolled by the Republican staff of the Benghazi panel. And hey, great work by them and Chairman Trey Gowdy to use the nation’s leading liberal newspaper in this way. 

Clinton still has some questions to answer, two that I can think of: Why did she not take a state.gov address? And is the Times accurate in writing that “her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act”? If she can’t put forward persuasive answers to these two questions, then there may still be something here. 

But the Times has some questions to answer to: Did you know that the new regs went into effect after Clinton left office? And if you didn’t, why not? And if you did, why did you leave that fact out of the story? One can imagine Clinton coming up with decent answers to her questions, but it’s kind of hard to see how the Times can.

Last edited by TheLagerLad (3/03/2015 9:08 pm)

Let's back up the train ya'll as it may turn out that the rules Hillary is supossed to have brokenmay not have existed during her time as Secretary of State  -  Lager

That's what I thought.  Anyway, sounds like a case of shoddy and sloppy journalism from the start.

Last edited by Just Fred (3/03/2015 10:24 pm)