Morning Joe’s panel unanimously slammed Hillary Clinton on Monday for repeatedly trying to justify her private email server by comparing it to former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s sporadic use of a private email.
The segment opened on Monday with a compilation of clips of Clinton telling different crowds about the use of private email by different secretaries of state and the use of her own private email server.
"Colin Powell and I are exactly on the same page," she said.
Morning Joe co-host Joe Scarborough had a simple response to this compilation.
"No," he said.
The other co-host of Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski, had the same reaction.
"No," she said.
Scarborough said that Clinton seems to be using this defense based off of a memo that Powell sent her from a person AOL email account.
To drive the point home, the panel put up a graphic to show the distinct differences between Powell’s email practices at the State Department and Clinton’s, and it read the following:
- Never used a private server
- At the time he became secretary in 2001, the State Department didn’t have a comparable unclassified system
- Used personal emails only for unclassified information
- Used an office desktop of all classified communications
Scarborough cited that Powell spoke to People about this issue, telling the magazine that Clinton had been trying to pin the personal server scandal on him. He also said that she had been using her server for over a year before Powell sent the memo about his personal email use:
"Her people have been trying to pin it on me," Powell, 79, told PEOPLE Saturday night at the Apollo in the Hamptons 2016 Night of Legends fête in East Hampton, New York.
"The truth is, she was using [the private email server] for a year before I sent her a memo telling her what I did," Powell added.
"There is no comparison," Scarborough said.
Left-leaning columnist Mike Barnicle agreed. He differentiated between the use of private email and having a private email server.
"The biggest distinction, the only distinction, the most important distinction is that ... Powell never had his own personal server," he said. "That is the biggest difference. I mean, if you had sent Colin Powell an email on his personal email account when he was secretary of state, you’d get a personal email back, having nothing to do with classification, nothing. But, there was no personal email server."
"You look at these different places where he used different types of emails," Brzezinski said. "It shows that he cared what he was emailing—and this was actually an issue back then."
Scarborough said that the classification system had changed immensely between the two tenures of the secretaries of state.
"Therein lies the biggest problem," Scarborough said. "What Hillary Clinton did was force anybody that wanted to communicate with her to not send the classified email, but to take it from the classified email server and then break it down, break that information down, on an unsecured and then send it in. It’s unbelievable."