DAMNING leaked personal emails from former USA secretary of state Colin Powell have roundly criticised both presidential candidates, with the former top diplomat labelling Donald Trump a “national disgrace” and lamenting he’d “rather not” have to vote for Hillary Clinton.
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In an email to President George W. Bush’s other secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, Powell called investigations into the events a “stupid witch hunt”.
The Powell disclosures – more than two years’ worth, ending last month – were posted on a site that analysts have linked to the Russian Government.
One of the reasons we feel Powell is admired and trusted is that he’s savvy and calculating about when to comment in public and when to keep his opinions to himself. He also recommends not givng any public attention to the nominee as “to go on and call him an idiot just emboldens him”.
Of the birther movement, which Trump led earlier this decade by publicly questioning whether President Barack Obama was born in the United States, Powell said its underpinnings were clear. “He takes us for idiots”, Powell wrote.
In response to Powell’s disdain, Trump tweeted: “I was never a fan of Colin Powell after his weak understanding of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq = disaster. We can do much better!”
But Powell noted that “blame also rests on his leaders and supports back here”. Powell was criticizing the Cheney’s’ September 2015 book, Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America. “Trump is taking on water. We need a revolution and it will begin with the GOP crashing and burning up its current form”.
The release of Powell’s emails is the latest in a string of leaks that appear meant to influence the 2016 presidential election.
The head of the Democratic National Committee said on Tuesday the organization had been hacked by Russian state-sponsored agents who were trying to influence the USA presidential election.
The two situations indeed aren’t completely analogous, as the Washington Post’s Fact Checker has written, but Clinton has used Powell to suggest that her private email server wasn’t totally novel.
In the interview – which was taped on Wednesday – Clinton said she was “well aware that I still have work to do” to attract young black voters.
Powell has acknowledged using a private email account with both senior USA officials and for back-channel communications with foreign dignitaries. His online activity has figured heavily of late into the controversy around Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.
Powell wrote that he had told Clinton’s “minions repeatedly that they are making a mistake trying to drag me in, yet they still try”. “Pat Kennedy, Intel community, DS and yes HRC”, Powell wrote, calling Clinton by her initials.
In another email, August 18, 2015, he wrote, using her initials, that: “Everything HRC touches she kind of screws up with hubris”.
Powell was referring to Ambassador Christopher Stevens who was killed in the 2012 attack on a US facility in Benghazi, Libya.
In May, Powell messaged with a former colleague as the State Department’s inspector general prepared to release a report critical of both his and Clinton’s use of private email to conduct government business.
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Powell responded by writing: “Nope”. I had a secure State.gov machine. “I’m going to let this President serve out his term with distinction and make the decisions that he thinks are right for the country”. Fifteen years later they come up with this.
