Hillary Clinton may not have told the truth when she told FBI investigators former Secretary of State Colin Powell urged her to use her personal email account when she served as top diplomat.

News of the supposed advice comes from a new book by a close Clinton ally, Joe Conason. “Powell told her to use her own email, as he had done, except for classified communications, which he had sent and received via a State Department computer,” Conason writes in his book, “Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton.”

“[U]se of personal email had been transformative for the department,” Powell allegedly told Clinton, according to to Conason, “thus confirmed a decision [Clinton] had made months earlier — to keep her personal account and use it for most messages.”

That excuse — that Colin Powell told her to do it — was the one she offered to the FBI when sat down for an interview in its year long investigation into her private email server, the New York Times reported Friday.

But Powell cast doubt on the story in a statement released Friday.

“General Powell has no recollection of the dinner conversation. He did write former Secretary Clinton an email memo describing his use of his personal AOL email account for unclassified messages and how it vastly improved communications within the State Department,” a Powell spokeswoman said in a statement.

“At the time there was no equivalent system within the Department. He used a secure State computer on his desk to manage classified information.”