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Colin Powell insults Clinton and calls Trump 'national disgrace' in leaked emails

The yearlong scandal around Clinton's private server, which critics call a threat to national security, dragged Powell into the spotlight this summer.
REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

A new leak of private emails reveals that Colin Powell has been particularly chatty about fellow ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private email server.

"They are going to dick up the legitimate and necessary use of emails with friggin record rules. I saw email more like a telephone than a cable machine," Powell says in the emails, dumped by D.C. Leaks, an anonymous site, on Tuesday. "As long as the stuff is unclassified. I had a secure State.gov machine. Everything HRC touches she kind of screws up with hubris."

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"Dumb. She should have done a 'Full Monty' at the beginning," Powell says in another. "I warned her staff three times over the past two years not to try to connect it to me. I am not sure HRC even knew or understood what was going on in the basement."

Powell's aide Peggy Cifrino told VICE News: "[W]e are confirming that he was hacked and these are his emails. We have no further comment at this time.

The yearlong scandal around Clinton's private server, which critics call a threat to national security, dragged Powell into the spotlight this summer. As Secretary of State, he used a personal computer hooked up to a private connection, prompting defenders of Clinton to point out her actions were not unprecedented and that the media has held her to an unfair standard.

Earlier this month, the House of Representatives released email correspondence between Powell and Clinton in which he advised her how to use her own private email for State Department business. He said he used his "to do business with some foreign leaders and some of the senior folks in the Department on their personal email accounts." (Clinton, however, took things one step further and used a private server in addition to a personal email account.)

The emails reveal that Powell feels his arrangement was very different, and that he's not so quick to defend Clinton.

Still, the retired general is much, much harsher about her opponent, Republican nominee Donald Trump.

"Trump is a national disgrace and an international pariah," Powell writes in one email from this summer. "He appeals to the worst angels of the GOP nature and poor white folks," reads another.

"For him to say yesterday that within four years he would have 95 percent of blacks voting for him is schizo fantasy," he writes, before taking a shot at disgraced ex-Fox News chief Roger Ailes. "[Him] as an adviser won't heal with women."