When I was in the government in one capacity or another I had various interactions with Powell. He was always very decent to me, and often refused to let the various generals, admirals and other potentates in the room silence me when my opinions contradicted theirs. Others did that as well, but we are discussing Powell and his mail.
Powell's infamous performance at the UN justifying war with Iraq was a turning point for me with regard to Powell. He and his pal Wilkerson ignored professional intelligence analysts at State/INR and went out to Langley where the snake oil salesmen "convinced" them that the Iraqi government had all sorts of wunderwaffen. That resulted in the scene with the little flask held aloft with George Tenet sitting smugly behind. Slam dunk!
Nevertheless, his e-mails are interesting. Who collected them from the "ether?" That seems unclear. Clinton asserts it was the Russians. The commercial e-mail systems are easy to penetrate and to mine for data. It could literally be anyone, anywhere in the world.
Some points from his e-mail traffic:
1. “If Donald were to somehow win,” Powell wrote in a June 23 email to Rice, “by the end of the first week in office he'd be saying 'What the hell did I get myself into?’”
“I think his attention span may be waning because national campaigning is a lot harder than just showing up at rallies,” Rice said of Trump earlier in that conversation.
2. "I would rather not have to vote for her, although she is a friend I respect," Powell wrote. "A 70-year person with a long track record, unbridled ambition, greedy, not transformational, with a husband still d---ing bimbos at home (according to the NYP)."
3. “One day when we both have had too many drinks we can discuss why [President George W. Bush] tolerated him and why Dick [Cheney], a successful SecDef, was so committed to Don,” Powell wrote on Dec. 16. “I must say I gagged as [President George H.W. Bush] praised him as the ‘best’ at the statuary hall unveiling.”
4. Powell called Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense who spearheaded the Iraq invasion, “a f--king liar” after reading an interview in which Wolfowitz blamed Powell’s State Department for what many experts allege were the United States’ two largest post-invasion blunders: the disbanding of the Iraqi army and the decision to expel members of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist Party from the civilian government.
“Bremer worked for him,” Powell wrote to Lawrence Wilkerson, his former chief of staff, on Aug. 28, after Wilkerson flagged the interview for him. He was referring to Paul Bremer, who oversaw the post-invasion transitional government in Iraq. “It wasn't State, it was the President and the guy who reported to Paul.”
“This is the narrative in the Feith and Rummy books,” Powell said, referring to memoirs by Rumsfeld and Bush-era Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith. “No one has really fallen for it.”
5. " ... in an email to Rice, Powell wrote that he would “never forget the lunch in your office when Don abdicated the position.” It’s not clear to what he was referring, but Powell added that Rumsfeld “should have been fired that afternoone [sic].” Rumsfeld “got mad when I tried to pull his you know what out of the fire by sending [National Security Council Iraq specialist Robert] Blackwill out there,” Rice wrote, recalling the meeting. “And when you and I started to talk to [Bremer] directly.” “Yep,” Powell responded, “remember his tantrum vividly.”
-------------
Good solid stuff! Either some small group of SIGINT collectors has scooped up a lot of material and is metering it out as planned or many, many groups or individuals are doing the same thing. IMO there is still a great deal of SIGINT derived material "out there" which will appear before the election. A problem for the holders of the material is placement in the media because so many media outlets will suppress the material for political and corporate interest reasons.
This article doesn't have the "She has screwed up everything she has touched from hubris" item. Someone find it please if it exists.
Ah! Here it is courtesy of "Kooshy"
"Everything HRC touches she kind of screws up with hubris", Powell wrote in an email to private equity investor Jeffrey Leeds. Decrying "friggin record rules", Powell wrote that he "saw email more like a telephone than a cable machine". "On HD tv she doesn't look good", Powell wrote. "She is working herself to death", he said." pl
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/09/colin-powell-emails-clinton-trump-rumsfeld-228158
http://www.crcconnection.com/2016/09/15/colin-powell-wrote-in-an-email-that-bill-clinton-was-d.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubris