Colin Powell rips into ‘racist’ Donald Trump: ‘national disgrace’

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, in newly leaked emails, calls Donald Trump “a national disgrace” and laments Hillary Clinton’s attempt to equate her email practices with his.

“Yup, the whole birther movement was racist”, Mr Powell wrote in an email to a former aide, according to BuzzFeed. “A 70-year person with a long track record, unbridled ambition, greedy, not transformational, with a husband still (expletive) bimbos at home (according to the NYP)”.

The messages, the existence of which were first reported by BuzzFeed and The Intercept, were posted to DCleaks, an organisation affiliated with other recent hacks of high- profile figures.

Another email sent in August 2016 to NBC News reporter Andrea Mitchell said that Powell “told [Clinton] how I was using my personal computer for [unclassified] emails”. The former four-star general ripped the Republican Party nominee apart, calling him a “national disgrace” and “international pariah”, The Washington Post reported.

Of the birther movement, which Trump promoted, he expressed consternation that President Barack Obama was born a “secret Muslim”.

“H.R.C. could have killed this two years ago by merely telling everyone honestly what she had done and not tie me into it”, Mr Powell wrote late last month, referring to Mrs Clinton by her initials. “That’s what the 99% believe”.

But Powell noted that “blame also rests on his leaders and supports back here”.

“I have a great deal of respect for Colin Powell, and I have a lot of sympathy for anyone whose emails become public”, she said. The emails are notable for their candor about Trump.

But it seems Powell was particularly annoyed that his name kept popping up in reports about Clinton’s ongoing scandals. Clinton claimed during her interview with the Federal Bureau of Investigation regarding her private email server that Powell used private email too while serving as secretary of state and gave her advice on how to set it up. It was Powell’s gmail account that was hacked.

Powell added another complaint: “I told you about the gig I lost at a University because she so overcharged them they came under heat and couldn’t any [sic] fees for awhile”. One of Powell’s leaked emails show a conversation between him and a former staffer for Clinton, Cheryl Mills, who forwarded a transcript of Clinton’s CNN interview to Powell, which he calls “very nice”. In another spot, he declared of Clinton that “Everything HRC touches she kind of screws up with hubris”.

The messages contain comments that reflect that he, too, sought to use private email as a way to avoid creating documents retained by the government.