Powell: ‘I retained none’ of my State emails

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell on Sunday said that he had no record of his State Department email messages.

“I don’t have any of them – I don’t have any to turn over,” Powell told George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week.” “I did not keep a cache of them. I did not print them off. I do not have thousands of pages somewhere in my personal files.”

{mosads}Powell was secretary of State from 2000 to 2004. The retired Army general was weighing in on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s controversial private email server.

“I can’t speak to Mrs. Clinton and what she should do now,” he added. “That would be inappropriate.”

Powell said his own stay at State featured an “antiquated” email system. The former secretary said the agency improved its technology by buying 44,000 then-new computers and ensuring modern Internet connections.

“What I did when I entered the State Department, I found an antiquated system that had to be modernized and modernized quickly,” he said. “But in order to change the culture, to change the brainwave as I call it, I started using it in order to get everybody to use it, so we could be a 21st century institution and not a 19th century institution.”

Lawmakers are concerned Clinton’s decision to conduct State Department business on a private email server obscures records of her time there.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (R-Calif.) said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the situation “has to be cleared up.”

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), meanwhile, said Clinton could have committed a crime if she knowingly withheld messages from Congressional investigators.

Powell said on Sunday that he did not know if State kept his own records.

“I don’t know if the servers at the State Department captured those or not,” he said. “And most – they were all unclassified, and most of them, I think are pretty benign, so I’m not terribly concerned even if they were able to recover them.”