Colin Powell explains how he handled his email as Secretary of State and tellingly refrains from opining about whether what Hillary did was wrong.

Follow the silences in the On "Meet the Press" transcript:

CHUCK TODD: Your name gets invoked a lot during this email controversy. Once and for all, can you explain what you did with your emails as secretary of state?

COLIN POWELL: You can read my book. I wrote a whole chapter about what I did in my latest book. It Worked for Me, Harper Collins, you can buy it on Amazon. But the point is I arrived at the State Department as secretary with a disastrous information system there. And I had to fix it. And so what I had to do is bring the State Department to the 21st century.

Obvious inference:  Hillary inherited the updated system and didn't need to fix anything to get started.

And the way of doing that was getting new computers. That gave them access to the whole world. And then in order to make sure that I changed the brainware of the department, and not just the software and hardware, I started to use email.  I had two machines on my desk. I had a secure State Department machine, which I used for secure material, and I had a laptop that I could use for email. And I would email relatives, friends, but I would also email in the department. But it was mostly housekeeping stuff. "What's the status in this paper? What's going on here?" So it was my own classified system, but I had a classified system also on my desk.

That's pretty hard to understand, actually. "Mostly" housekeeping? So, not all housekeeping (whatever counts as "housekeeping"!).  The reason to use email is to "make sure" that the "brainware" has been changed? What is it about email that gives special assurance that things have changed, and what's the point of using the strange word "brainware"? I assume he means something like "wetware" (jargon for human brains), but "brainware" does not Google (other than as the name of a software company). I can't get to any online definitions of the word, which also appears nowhere in the NYT archive (other than as the name of that company). Is Powell being obfuscatory or is this just how the man talks?

But what we want to know is what Powell thinks of the invocations of his name in the context of Hillary's email controversy. Is what he did the same or different? Chuck Todd invites him to help us out here by asking "Do you believe this is a serious issue for Secretary Clinton or not? But Powell won't answer:

COLIN POWELL: I can't answer that. You know, we now have two IGs working on it, we have the F.B.I. working on it. Mrs. Clinton and some of her associates will be testifying, or be going before inquiries with the Congress. And I think it's best for me to talk about what I know and not about what occurred under Secretary Clinton's jurisdiction.

Now, maybe what he's thinking is it's more dignified to keep silent and most useful for him to say what he did and let others figure out the comparisons. He has, after all, first hand knowledge of what he did, and it's only a matter of opinion how close that is to what Hillary did. And to state one's opinion is to undermine the value of that opinion, because everyone who's invoking his name seems to already be for or against Hillary. To say she only did what Powell did, more or less, is to reveal yourself as pro-Hillary, and to say what Powell did was different is to align with the anti-Hillary crowd. Therefore Powell has his best credibility if he keeps his silence.

But in that silence, there is enough material to see that Powell believes that what he did was different. The other machine was "on my desk" and a "classified system" in the State Department. Plus, he initially found himself in a "disastrous information system" and he "had to fix it." You don't need Powell to make additional statements that these are distinctions from what Hillary did.