Colin Powell endorses Hillary Clinton for president

Impact

Former secretaries of state are sticking together: Colin Powell told a Long Island, New York, audience Tuesday that he's backing Hillary Clinton for the presidency.

Powell, who served as the nation's first African-American top diplomat under Republican then-President George W. Bush, said Democrat Clinton would serve with distinction if elected, according to a reporter for Newsday.

Powell, a Republican retired four-star Army general who was also the first black man to serve on and chair the Joint Chiefs of Staff, laid into GOP nominee Donald Trump as an unqualified charlatan, per the Newsday reporter.

Harlem-born Powell made his feelings known at the fall luncheon of the Long Island Association, a business group.

A spokesman for the organization, Matthew Cohen, confirmed to Mic that Powell "said verbatim, 'I am voting for Hillary Clinton.'"

After his email was hacked, Powell had to account for scathing remarks he made about Clinton and her husband, the former president.

"I would rather not have to vote for her, although she is a friend I respect," Powell wrote, per Politico. "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 [New York Post])."