Pressed by the F.B.I. about her email practices at the State Department, Hillary Clinton told investigators that former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell had advised her to use a personal email account
The account is included in the notes the Federal Bureau of Investigation handed over to Congress on Tuesday, relaying in detail the three-and-a-half-hour interview with Mrs. Clinton in early July that led to the decision by James B. Comey, the bureaus director, not to pursue criminal charges against her.
Separately, in a 2009 email exchange that also emerged during the F.B.I. questioning, Mrs. Clinton, who had already decided to use private email, asked Mr. Powell about his email practices when he was the nations top diplomat under George W. Bush, according to a person with direct knowledge of Mr. Powells appearance in the documents, who would not speak for attribution.
The journalist Joe Conason first reported the conversation between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Powell in his coming book about Bill Clintons postpresidency, Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton, which The Times received an advanced copy of.
Mr. Conason describes a conversation in the early months of Mrs. Clintons tenure at the State Department at a small dinner party hosted by Madeleine Albright, another former secretary of state, at her home in Washington. Henry Kissinger and Condoleezza Rice also attended.
Toward the end of the evening, over dessert, Albright asked all of the former secretaries to offer one salient bit of counsel to the nations next top diplomat, Mr. Conason writes. Powell told her to use her own email, as he had done, except for classified communications, which he had sent and received via a State Department computer.
Mr. Conason continued, Saying that his use of personal email had been transformative for the department, Mr. Powell thus confirmed a decision she had made months earlier to keep her personal account and use it for most messages.
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Mr. Powells office released a statement on Thursday night saying he had no recollection of the dinner conversation. He did write Mrs. Clinton an email memo, which may exist in the F.B.I. files, describing his use of his personal email account for unclassified messages and how it vastly improved communications within the State Department, the statement said.
In his memoir, It Worked for Me, Mr. Powell writes about his personal email, and he has taken pride in having tried to advance the antiquated technology practices at the State Department. But his use of personal email and Mrs. Clintons arent entirely parallel. Mr. Powell did not have a server at his house or rely on outside contractors, as Mrs. Clinton did at her home in Chappaqua, N.Y.
A State Department inspector general report released in May said that Mr. Powell and other senior officials had used personal email accounts for official business, but that by the time Mrs. Clinton took office the rules were clear that using a private server in such a manner was neither allowed nor encouraged because of significant security risks.
