Former Secretaries of State Colin Powell & Hillary Clinton
The Daily Beast shares that former Secretary of State Colin Powell has announced he will be voting for Democrat (and former Secretary of State) Hillary Clinton in this year's presidential race.
The former George W. Bush cabinet member spoke at a luncheon on Long Island and, according to Newsday reporter Robert Brodsky, told attendees that Republican nominee Donald Trump “insults us every day” and is “selling people a bill of goods,” and so he will cast his vote for fellow ex-secretary Clinton. Powell has previously resisted declaring his support for either candidate, but has chided Trump as a “national disgrace.”
Reporter Robert Brodsky of New York Newsday first broke the news:
Boom. Colin Powell says he will vote for Hillary Clinton. Says will serve w/ distinction and cites experience and stamina
It appears email hacking continues to be the latest rage in this crazy election.
Today, we hear that hacking site DCleaks.com has released two years worth of former Secretary of State Colin Powell's private emails. Among the more interesting communications are those that refer to Donald Trump as a "national disgrace" and Republicans’ Benghazi investigations as a "witch hunt."
Powell has privately denounced Republican nominee Donald Trump in remarkably strong terms. "Trump is a national disgrace and an international pariah," Powell wrote in an email this June, as BuzzFeed News first reported. The email was sent to a journalist who had previously worked for Powell.
In another email, Powell wrote that Trump "appeals to the worst angels of the GOP nature and poor white folks," according to CNN. And elsewhere, he wrote that "the whole birther movement" — headed by Trump — "was racist."
Powell also had a similarly strongly worded dismissal of Republicans’ obsession with investigating the Benghazi attacks, and suggested the blame should fall on the late ambassador Chris Stevens for not taking his own security seriously enough. "Benghazi is a stupid witch hunt," he wrote in a December 2015 email to Condoleezza Rice, again according to BuzzFeed News. "Basic fault falls on a courageous ambassador who thoughts [sic] Libyans now love me and I am ok in this very vulnerable place."
Powell told NBC News that the emails are indeed real, adding, "The hackers have a lot more."
DCLeaks has been previously been alleged to have ties to Russian intelligence.
Discovered in the recent batch of emails from Hillary Clinton's private server is an communication from former Secretary of State Colin Powell to Clinton informing her how he used his own private email account during his time at the State Department.
Clinton has said in the past that Powell advised her early on in her time as Secretary of State about email use, although Powell says he didn't remember any such communications.
Up to now, this has been a question of who's telling the truth? Did Powell advise Clinton on email use or not?
Emails released by House Democrat Elijah Cummings Wednesday evening showed Powell, Secretary of State under the George W. Bush administration, answering a question from Clinton about smartphone use.
“Be very careful,” Powell told Clinton in a January 2009 exchange, saying that using a BlackBerry for State Department work could make the messages “part of the official record and subject to the law.”
He also admitted to going around State Department servers in diplomatic discussions.
Clinton had asked her predecessor about restrictions on BlackBerry use in the department, though Powell replied that didn’t have the device and used a computer hooked up to private phone line to communicate with friends.
“I even used it to do business with some foreign leader and some of the senior foreign leaders and some of the senior folks in the Department on their personal email accounts,” he wrote.
Rep. Elijah Cummings, who released the exchange as a member of the House Oversight Committee, said that the exchange shows “Secretary Powell advised Secretary Clinton with a detailed blueprint on how to skirt security rules and bypass requirements to preserve federal records.”
From the email dated January 23, 2009 (see above):
“What I did do was have a personal computer that was hooked up to a private phone line (sounds ancient.) So I could communicate with a wide range of friends directly without going through the State Department servers. I even used it to do business with some foreign leaders and some of the senior folks in the Department on their personal email accounts. I did the same thing on the road in hotels.”
ABC News is reporting that Hillary Clinton wasn't the Secretary of State to utilize a private email account.
It turns out immediate staffers for Condoleezza Rice, and Colin Powell himself, used non-State department email accounts while serving at SOS. These accounts have been found to have classified information on them.
Colin Powell and the immediate staff of Condoleezza Rice, both of whom served under President George W. Bush, also had information that was later deemed classified on non-State Department email accounts, according to a new memo from the State Department’s Inspector General, described to ABC News by Rep. Elijah Cummings.
That memo, dated Feb. 3 and addressed to Under Secretary of State for Management, Patrick Kennedy, was shared with Cummings, the ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform. ABC News has not seen the memo.
Cummings, who has long been critical of the many Republican-led investigations into Clinton’s email use, says this is just further evidence they are out to derail her campaign for President.
“Based on this new revelation, it is clear that the Republican investigations are nothing more than a transparent political attempt to use taxpayer funds to target the Democratic candidate for President,” Cummings said in a statement.
Since Rice and Powell were in a Republican administration, it'll be interesting to see how rabid anti-Hillary folks will try and square this new information.
Powell said the opponents of the proposal were ignoring the rapid development of Iran's nuclear program dating back to the Bush years.
"They have been on a superhighway for the last 10 years to create a nuclear weapon or a nuclear weapons program, with no speed limit. And in the last 10 years they have gone from 136 centrifuges up to something like 19,000 centrifuges. This agreement will bring them down to 5,000 centrifuges, all of them under [International Atomic Energy Agency] supervision. And I think this is a good outcome."
The Respect For Marriage Coalition will today launch a national print and television campaign in support of marriage equality. The coalition is made up of several progressive and LGBT groups like Freedom To Marry and the Human Rights Campaign.
The TV ad features a bipartisan group of political figures like former First Lady Laura Bush, former Secretary of Defense Colin Powell, former Vice President Dick Cheney and, finally, President Barack Obama. All showing their support for marriage equality.
In addition, a full-page print ad (below) will appear in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post in the next few days.
"When he took over, the country was in very very difficult straits. We were in the one of the worst recessions we had seen in recent times, close to a depression. The fiscal system was collapsing. Wall Street was in chaos, we had 800,000 jobs lost in that first month of the Obama administration and unemployment peaked a few months later at 10 percent. So we were in real trouble. The auto industry was collapsing, the housing was starting to collapse and we were in very difficult straits. And I saw over the next several years, stabilization come back in the financial community, housing is now starting to pick up after four years, it's starting to pick up. Consumer confidence is rising." - Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, announcing his endorsement of President Obama.
Gen. Colin Powell said Wednesday on CNN's "The Situation Room" that he supports legal same-sex marriage, either at the state or federal level.
"I have no problem with it," he said in the interview, which will air at 5 p.m. ET. "In terms of the legal matter of creating a contract between two people that's called marriage, and allowing them to live together with the protection of law, it seems to me is the way we should be moving in this country. And so I support the president's decision."
President Barack Obama announced his support of same-sex marriage, a change in his position, in early May.
Powell's statements on Wednesday also represented a turning point in his own public statements on the matter. The former secretary of state was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff when the military "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" position was implemented.
"It was the Congress that imposed 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell,' it was certainly my position, my recommendation to get us out of an even worse outcome that could have occurred," Powell told CNN's Wolf Blitzer, recalling former President Bill Clinton's support of overturning a ban on military service for gay individuals. After public opposition, "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," was seen as a compromise.
Powell said he is aware of religious objections to same-sex marriage, but spoke primarily about it as a matter of public policy.
"I respect the fact that many denominations have different points of view with respect to gay marriage and they can hold that in the sanctity in the place of their religion and not bless them or solemnize them," he said.
He said he has "a lot of friends who are individually gay but are in partnerships with loved ones, and they are as stable a family as my family is and they raise children. And so I don't see any reason not to say that they should be able to get married under the laws of their state or the laws of the country."
In 2010, Powell said he favored a military repeal of the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy and was in "full support" of Congressional action which resulted in the policy's repeal.
