After emails released between former US Secretary of State Colin Powell and a member of the European Parliament created rumors of an affair, Powell maintains that he did not have a romantic relationship with Corina Cretu, The Star reports.
On Thursday, Powell said in a statement on The Smoking Gun:
"Those type of emails ended a few years ago. There was no affair then and there is not one now." Powell also mentioned that while he and Cretu are friends and keep in touch, he has not seen her in several years.
The emails were obtained and exposed by a hacker called Guccifer who accessed Powell's email account in March. Guccifer just recently posted the emails on Google Drive and also sent them to news organizations.
In the emails, Powell notifies Cretu of Guccifer and that a security team is trying to find him. He also suggests that she delete all of the emails between them. Once Powell stopped responding to Cretu's emails in 2011, she said "I have loved you too much, too many years."
A year earlier, she had also stated that she did not believe that "at 43, I can cry more for a man like a teenager."
Powell has been married to his wife, Alma, for 50 years.
He claims to have met Cretu 10 years ago when she was an assistant to the president of Romania. She is currently a member of the European Parliament as a part of the Party of European Socialists and sits on the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs.
The former Secretary of State is not Guccifer's only high-profile victim. He has also hacked into the email accounts of former presidents George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton along with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Candance Bushnell, author of Sex and the City.
