When news broke that former Secretary of State Colin Powell's emails were hacked, just about every mainstream media headline read: "Colin Powell calls Donald Trump a 'national disgrace.'"

I get the punch that headline packs. But it misses the bigger takeaway from those leaked emails: They are far more damaging to Hillary Clinton than to Donald Trump.

The "revelation" that Powell has disdain for Trump can't be much of a surprise given his past endorsement of President Barack Obama and the fact that so many of his fellow generals and national security peers have publicly pushed back against the Republican nominee for months. Plus, seeing Trump being called a national disgrace or worse in the news media is pretty much an hourly occurrence in America these days and he's still surging in the polls.



Far more damaging are the emails where Powell discusses Clinton, her email scandal, her health, and her apparent hatred of President Obama. I suspect each of these suddenly very current topics, and not the slam on Trump, are the real reason why the alleged hacking outfit, DCLeaks.com chose to publish the emails now.

With Clinton's email scandal still very much in the news, it's disastrous that several of the hacked Powell emails contain his strong explanation of how his use of private email was fully legal and Clinton's was not. He also expresses serious anger at the Clinton campaign's attempts to compare her conduct and email server use to his own while he was Secretary of State. The emails show Powell has been concerned about this issue for more than a year and expressed frustrations with how Clinton has approached the scandal and his own relationship to it. And based on his anger over how the Clinton campaign handled the issue, the emails make it seem like Powell would have otherwise publicly endorsed Clinton over Trump by now. That endorsement is something one of Powell's Democratic email correspondents says would be a "knockout blow."