Colin Powell caught with his pants down - oops!!! AUGUST 1--As a notorious hacker seeks to distribute “very personal” e-mails sent to Colin Powell by a female Romanian diplomat, the retired general is denying that he engaged in an extramarital affair with the woman while he served as Secretary of State, though he recently advised her to delete all their online exchanges, The Smoking Gun has learned. In a statement addressing his relationship with Corina Cretu, a member of the European Parliament who previously held a series of senior posts in the Romanian government, Powell, 76, wrote that he has known Cretu for about 10 years, having first met her “when I was the Secretary of State and she was an assistant to the President of Romania. We occasionally attended the same diplomatic and international meetings.” Powell, who served in President George W. Bush’s cabinet for four years, said that he kept in touch with Cretu, 45, by e-mail after leaving the State Department in January 2005. “Over time the emails became of a very personal nature, but did not result in an affair. Those type of emails ended a few years ago. There was no affair then and there is not one now,” Powell added. Powell issued his statement (a copy of which can be found here) to TSG after a reporter sought to question him about the content of Cretu’s 2010 and 2011 correspondence, which was posted online this week. “This note responds to a series of posts placed by a ‘hacker,’” Powell wrote. While TSG did not mention Cretu (seen above) by name or refer to a possible romance, Powell’s swift denial of an affair--especially one possibly conducted with an official of a foreign government while he served as America’s chief diplomat--was clearly prompted by the sensitive nature of the e-mails sent to his personal AOL account. And likely by a desire on Powell’s part to address any appearance of impropriety, especially in light of last year’s crash-and-burn by retired General David Petraeus. In the “very personal” correspondence cited by Powell, Cretu calls him the love of her life and describes a relationship that spanned more than a decade. The 2010-2011 e-mails would leave most readers with the clear impression that the forlorn Cretu is writing about the twilight of a lengthy romance. As reported here in March, Powell’s e-mail and Facebook accounts were illegally accessed by “Guccifer,” the hacker who has spent the last eight months breaking into the online accounts of Clinton, Bush, and Obama administration officials; former FBI agents; defense contractors; Bush family members and friends; and assorted public figures, including journalist Carl Bernstein, author Candace Bushnell, and John Doerr, the billionaire venture capitalist. Immediately after the Powell hacks, “Guccifer” sent some of the pilfered e-mails and photos to a variety of news outlets (and the anti-secrecy site cryptome.org, which posted the material). This week--four months after the online break-ins--“Guccifer” returned, like a nasty rash, to continue vexing Powell. Armed with the Cretu correspondence, which “Guccifer” apparently copied during the initial AOL incursion, the hacker uploaded 10 e-mails sent to Powell and a variety of photos to Google Drive. Then, in a bid to expose the material directly to Powell’s Facebook followers (his page has nearly 87,000 “likes”), the hacker posted a message on Powell’s wall that included a link to the Google Drive page.
Posted on: Fri, 02 Aug 2013 09:54:47 +0000
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