"Be very careful. I got around it all by not saying much and not using systems that captured the data," former Secretary of State Colin Powell emailed Hillary Clinton about his use of a Blackberry to conduct official business. | AP Photo Powell warned Clinton about using a BlackBerry

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell warned Hillary Clinton about using a BlackBerry to conduct official business in her first days as President Barack Obama's secretary of state, according to the FBI investigation's report into Clinton's use of a private server to handle classified information in office released Friday.

According to the report, Clinton emailed Powell on Jan. 23, 2009, to ask about his use of a BlackBerry during his time in office from 2001 to 2005. In his response, according to the FBI, Powell told Clinton that if it became "public" that she was using a BlackBerry to "do business," the emails could become "official records[s] and subject to the law."


"Be very careful. I got around it all by not saying much and not using systems that captured the data," Powell said in the same email.

Clinton told the FBI that she understood Powell's comments to mean that any of her work-related communications would be records of the government and "did not factor into her decision to use a personal e-mail account," according to the report.

Powell previously said he had "no recollection" of a dinner conversation during which the former secretary of state was said to have told Clinton to "use her own email, as he had done, except for classified communications, which he had sent and received via a State Department computer," according to an account from Joe Conason in a forthcoming book about Bill Clinton.

Asked about Powell's comments on CNN last month, Clinton remarked, "I appreciated the time he took when I was preparing to become secretary. And I valued his advice. I’m not going to relitigate in public my private conversations with him."

House Oversight ranking member Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), who on Monday sent a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper requesting a copy of the full exchange by Sept. 6, offered a mixed response to the account related in the documents.

“I am encouraged that the FBI released some information today, but I am disappointed that it did not release all of the documents together, including documents relating to dozens of other senior officials who authored and sent emails that have now been deemed classified when they were sent," Cummings said in a statement. "Even with this limited production, however, the documents made public today demonstrate that our nation’s classification system is fundamentally broken and in desperate need of reform.”