Hackers have leaked personal emails from former Secretary of State Colin Powell, in which he describes Donald Trump as a “national disgrace” and an “international pariah,” Buzzfeed reported. The website DCLeaks.com obtained the emails, which include exchanges between journalist and former Powell aide Emily Miller as well as other Powell associates. The leaks also highlight disagreement between Powell and the Clinton campaign over the use of her private email server during her time as Secretary of State.

In one email to Miller, Powell wrote that Trump “is in the process of destroying himself, no need for Dems to attack him. [Speaker of the House] Paul Ryan is calibrating his position again.” Powell also said that the idea promoted by Trump and others that President Obama was not born in the United States is racist. He said:

Yup, the whole birther movement was racist. That’s what the 99% believe. When Trump couldn’t keep that up he said he also wanted to see if the certificate noted that he was a Muslim.

Powell is a self-described lifelong Republican but has endorsed President Obama twice, indicating that he has problems with the direction Republican Party of today is heading. In another email with “Racism” in the subject line, he wrote, “Or as I said before the 2012 election, ‘There is a level of intolerance in parts of the Republican Party.’” He went on to say he wouldn’t comment about Trump to the media, arguing that it would feed into his ego.

Colin Powell also said that having Roger Ailes, who resigned from Fox news over sexual harassment allegations, as an adviser won’t exactly help Trump win over women’s votes, Buzzfeed reported.

Shortly after the leak, Powell confirmed that the emails are authentic and said that the hackers “have a lot more.” The website, DNCLeaks.com, has links to Russian-backed hackers who were previously accused of breaking into the accounts of the Democratic National Committee and releasing emails that embarrassed the party.

#DCLeaks Powell in leaked email: ‘I didn’t tell Hillary to have a private server at home’ https://t.co/uxALVOi4CC

— DC Leaks (@DCleaks_) September 14, 2016

In other leaked emails, Powell talked about Hillary Clinton’s private email server, an issue he wished to stay far away from. In February he wrote to Kenneth Duberstein, a White House chief of staff under president Reagan, saying, “I didn’t tell Hillary to have a private server at home, connected to the Clinton Foundation, two contractors, took away 60,000 emails, had her own domain.”

And in September 2015 email to Lawrence Wilkerson, his former chief of staff, he wrote, “[Hillary Clinton] and her mishandling of this has really given her a major problem I do not wish to get involved in, despite the best efforts of her team to drag me in.”

Defenders of Hillary Clinton like Representative Elijah Cummings have tried to point to Powell and Rice as a precedent for the use of a private email account while serving as Secretary of State. In a press release, Representative Cummings noted that both Rice and Powell had “received classified national security information” on their personal accounts. But Powell took issue with the classified emails that many cited, claiming that they were not classified at the time. Both Powell and Rice expressed, over email, an increasing annoyance with the situation.

This also led Powell to email Duberstein. “Stupid State Department dragged me in and I had to take care of myself […] I warned them. Don’t say these unclassified messages are classified or should have been classified,” he wrote.

Emma Von Zeipel

Emma Von Zeipel is a staff writer at Law Street Media. She is originally from one of the islands of Stockholm, Sweden. After working for Democratic Voice of Burma in Thailand, she ended up in New York City. She has a BA in journalism from Stockholm University and is passionate about human rights, good books, horses, and European chocolate. Contact Emma at EVonZeipel@LawStreetMedia.com.

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Right now there’s a controversy over emails in the U.S. government. It all started with the news that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used a personal email address to conduct her job in the State Department. However, the controversy has continued with politicians and prominent figures from both sides of the aisle coming out in support or condemnation, and raising what could have been an interesting conversation about the use of email in our government.

In terms of Clinton’s emails, it’s unclear whether or not what she did was technically illegal. However, it’s definitely frowned upon, especially in light of the scrutiny that Clinton herself levied against the private email accounts used in the Bush Administration. That being said, Clinton has now turned over many pages of her correspondence, roughly 55,000 pages worth. Some of the criticism toward Clinton has to do with concerns that the American people still don’t have full information over the terrorist attack against the American embassy in Benghazi, Libya in 2012. However, Representative Aaron Schiff (D-CA) has said that the committee looking into the Benghazi incident got everything they asked for from Clinton, and that there was nothing that they found probative.

Colin Powell, another former Secretary of State, has also come to Clinton’s defense, explaining with regard to his emails:

I don’t have any to turn over, I did not keep a cache of them. I did not print them off. I do not have thousands of pages somewhere in my personal files. And, in fact, a lot of the emails that came out of my personal account went into the State Department system. They were addressed to State Department employees and the state.gov domain. But I don’t know if the servers at the State Department captured those or not. They were all unclassified and most of them, I think, are pretty benign. So I’m not terribly concerned even if they were able to recover them.

It’s not just her predecessors who are weighing in on this debate. While some Democrats have shown strong support, others have urged her to give an explanation for why her personal account was used during that period. Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA), for example, declared that Clinton needs to explain exactly what happened with the email mix up, and emphasized that continued silence would just hurt her moving forward.

On the other hand, some Republicans have taken advantage of the confusion and controversy to slam the likely 2016 presidential candidate. That’s to be expected, of course, but some have also taken the opportunity to prove how different they are than Clinton–and presumably by extension, all Democrats. The most obvious example is Senator Lindsey Graham, who on “Meet the Press” this week told everyone “I don’t email. No, you can have every email I’ve ever sent. I’ve never sent one.”

In some ways I suppose that’s not that surprising. As Philip Bump of the Washington Post pointed out, 15 percent of American adults don’t use the Internet. That being said, Graham is also on the Senate Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law, so his admission that he doesn’t use email could definitely be considered troublesome.

Graham wasn’t the only Republican figure who proclaimed that he shies away from e-mail. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) of 2008 election fame explained that he doesn’t use e-mail because:

I’m afraid that if I was emailing, given my solid, always calm temperament that I might email something that I might regret. You could send out an email that you would regret later on and would be maybe taken out of context And frankly, I don’t have any trouble communicating with my constituents without it.

This entire debate truly strikes me as odd, because what could have actually been a productive discussion about the ethics of communicating with private or business email addresses has sparked a lot of other, significantly less productive talking points. Besides feeding into the incredibly inane Benghazi speculation that seems like it will go on forever, our politicians are now bragging about their detachment from technology. Are we suddenly going to have all the potential 2016 candidates proclaiming whether or not they use e-mail? It’s a pretty ubiquitous tool that most of us use in daily life–I don’t think it’s really a political position.

I’ve long thought that the 2016 elections were going to be particularly nasty–even nastier than 2008 and 2012 in many ways. I think we’re starting to see the beginning of what will be a lot of highly publicized debates over, quite frankly, nothing of consequence.

Anneliese Mahoney

Anneliese Mahoney is Managing Editor at Law Street and a Connecticut transplant to Washington D.C. She has a Bachelor’s degree in International Affairs from the George Washington University, and a passion for law, politics, and social issues. Contact Anneliese at amahoney@LawStreetMedia.com.

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