Colin Powell told Hillary Clinton how he 'got around' email rules

Hillary Clinton has repeatedly acknowledged that setting up a private email server while Secretary of State was a "mistake," but Democrats rolled out a new explanation yesterday: it's all Colin Powell's fault.

On Wednesday, Democratic members of the House of Representatives released, what else, an email from former Secretary of State Colin Powell to Clinton in which he detailed his use of a personal email address to conduct government business.

Clinton emailed Powell just after President Obama's inauguration in January 2009 to ask if he had used a Blackberry phone while Secretary of State. He sent a friendly and lengthy response ("Love, Colin" was his sign-off) that he did not but that he used a private email account to "communicate with a wide range of friends directly without it going through the State Department servers."

He added that he "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." He advised her to be "very careful" about getting a Blackberry because it "may become an official record and subject to the law." He "got around" such rules, he wrote, "by not saying much and not using systems that captured the data." Unlike Clinton, however, Powell did not use a private email server, just a private AOL email address.

Colin Powell was secretary of state from 2001 to 2005 under President George W. Bush, before the smartphone era.

Democratic Representative Elijah Cummings jumped on the exchange releasing a statement that Powell supplied Clinton with "a detailed blueprint on how to skirt security rules and bypass requirements to preserve federal records." The extra scrutiny on Clinton but not Powell, he claimed, demonstrated Republican hypocrisy.

The controversy over Clinton's email server has followed the Democratic presidential nominee the past 18 months on the campaign trail. Even if she wins in November, Republicans are already signaling that investigations may continue. Republican Congressman Jason Chaffetz, chairman of the House Oversight and Government reform committee, has called on the Justice Department to open an inquiry into whether Clinton committed perjury in testimony before the Benghazi committee. Chaffettz told The New York Times this week that he would be "derelict in my duties to drop it now or after the election and let it go."