Hillary Clinton decided to remain quiet on Colin Powell's private email correspondence. | Getty Clinton offers Powell 'sympathy' after email hack

Hillary Clinton is keeping quiet about the contents of newly leaked messages from the personal email account of former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who had harsh criticisms of the Democratic nominee, the former Bush administration, and Donald Trump.

"I'm not going to comment on anything that is said in a private email," Clinton told the The Tom Joyner Radio Show in an interview taped Wednesday and aired Thursday morning.


Clinton, whose emails from the State Department were released after it was revealed that she used a private email server during her tenure, said she has "a great deal of respect for Colin Powell, and I have a lot of sympathy for anyone whose emails become public."

"I’m not going to start discussing someone else’s private emails. I’ve already spent a lot of time talking about my own, as you know," she told CNN anchor Don Lemon. "What I think is really important about the emails is the chilling fact, Don, that the Russians are continuing to attempt to interfere in our election. And I have to say I’m increasingly concerned by how we’ve seen Donald Trump’s alarming closeness with the Kremlin become more and more clear over the course of this campaign. It’s deeply concerning."

Powell used explicit language in one July 2014 email to New York financier Jeffrey Leeds, writing, "I would rather not have to vote for her, although she is a friend I respect."

Powell went on to describe Clinton, then 66, as 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)."

In another leaked email chain from this February, Powell vented to former Reagan White House chief of staff Kenneth Duberstein about the Clinton campaign's attempts to drag him into defending her use of a private server as secretary of state.

“I didn't tell Hillary to have a private server at home, connected to the Clinton Foundation, two contractors, took away 60,000 emails, had her own domain,” Powell said in the exchange.

Powell also complained to Duberstein in an email about the State Department Inspector General memo that mislabeled messages used in defense of Clinton that were not classified at the time he received them but later upgraded.

“Stupid State Department dragged me in and I had to take care of myself,” he wrote. “I warned them. Don't say these unclassified messages are classified or should have been classified.”

