Colin Powell called Donald Trump a “national disgrace” who is “in the process of destroying himself” in an email to a former aide that has been hacked and leaked online.
The former Secretary of State, who led the State Department under Republican President George W. Bush, confirmed the emails were authentic to NBC News, adding that “the hackers have a lot more.”
Much of the content of these emails was first reported by the website BuzzFeed which quotes Powell in one email from June 17, 2016, to Emily Miller, a journalist and former aide of Powell’s. He wrote that Trump “is in the process of destroying himself, no need for Dems to attack him.”
In another email Powell describes Trump’s birther crusade as a “racist” movement that incorrectly suggests Obama was born in a foreign country.
“Yup, the whole birther movement was racist,” Powell wrote. He also said Trump wanted to know whether Obama is a Muslim. “As I have said before, ‘What if he was?’ Muslims are born as Americans everyday.”
In a separate email, with the subject line “racism,” Powell wrote, “There is a level of intolerance in parts of the Republican Party.”
BuzzFeed reports that it obtained the emails from the website DCLeaks.com, which is suspected of having ties to Russian cyberspies. The private cybersecurity firm ThreatConnect has reported its suspicion that DCLeaks is a Russian-backed operation, linked to the notorious hacker Guccifer 2.0, who on Tuesday released more data stolen from the Democratic National Committee.
The conservative news outlet Daily Caller also reported tonight that two years of Powell emails have been stolen, from June 2014 to August 2016.