President-elect Donald Trump said Tuesday he won’t pursue criminal charges against Hillary Clinton because it would divide the nation — and she’s already “suffered greatly.”

“I don’t want to hurt the Clintons — I really don’t,” Trump said in an interview with the New York Times.

“She went through a lot and suffered greatly in many different ways.”

When asked whether he would pledge not to prosecute the former secretary of state, the president-elect said, “It’s just not something that I feel very strongly about.”

The president-elect added he was also concerned about the impact after the bitter election.

“I think it would be very divisive for the country,” he said.

Trump’s conciliatory gesture to Clinton is a sharp contrast to a key plank of his winning campaign message.

At the second presidential debate in October, he told his rival, “If I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation because there has never been so many lies, so much deception.”

Throughout her unsuccessful presidential bid, Clinton was dogged by an FBI probe of her handling of classified information on her private email server.

Trump was often met at campaign rallies with enthusiastic chants by his supporters of “Lock her up!”

“Special prosecutor, here we come. Right?” Trump said when the crowd began the chant at an Oct. 10 rally.

“If I win, we’re going to appoint a special prosecutor . . . Because we cannot allow this to happen in our country,” he added.

On Tuesday, Trump spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway called his move a healing gesture.

“I think Hillary Clinton still has to face the fact that a majority of Americans don’t find her to be honest or trustworthy, but if Donald Trump can help her heal, then perhaps that’s a good thing,” she told MSNBC.

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a former US attorney who had called throughout the campaign for Clinton to be prosecuted, said Trump’s shift was fine with him.

“Look, there’s a tradition in American politics that after you win an election, you sort of put things behind you,” he told reporters at Trump Tower. “And if that’s the decision he reached, that’s perfectly consistent with sort of a historical pattern of . . . you say a lot of things, even some bad things might happen, and then you can sort of put it behind you in order to unite the nation.”

But the move was met critically by some.

Tom Fitton, president of the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, said it would be a “betrayal of his promise to the American people” for Trump to abandon the Clinton case.

“Donald Trump must commit his administration to a serious, independent investigation of the very serious Clinton national security, email, and pay-to-play scandals,” he said, calling on the president-elect to “focus on healing the broken justice system.”