WASHINGTON — Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton should fully explain her actions involving the use of a private, nongovernment email account when she was the country’s top diplomat, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein said on Sunday, becoming the first major Democrat to urge Ms. Clinton to share more details of the private account.

Ms. Feinstein said the former first lady and New York senator “needs to step up and come out and say exactly what the situation was,” adding that from “this point on, the silence is going to hurt her.”

Ms. Clinton has been criticized for her use of the private email account and whether she complied with federal rules requiring officials to retain their communications. Ms. Clinton says that she’s turned over all relevant emails — totaling 55,000 pages — to the State Department for review.

Ms. Clinton’s husband, former President Bill Clinton, avoided the controversy Sunday morning.

Asked whether his wife was treated fairly, Mr. Clinton replied, “I’m not the one to judge that. I have an opinion, but I have a bias.”

“I shouldn’t be making news on this,” he said, in remarks reported on CNN.com.

Last week, the House committee investigating the Benghazi, Libya, attacks, issued subpoenas for Ms. Clinton’s emails, and the chairman said Sunday, “We’re not entitled to everything. I don’t want everything. I just want everything related to Libya and Benghazi.”

Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., said “there are gaps of months and months and months” in the emails the committee had previously received. “It’s not up to Secretary Clinton to decide what’s a public record and what’s not.”

Ms. Clinton is considered the front-runner for the party’s 2016 presidential nomination, but hasn’t entered the race yet. So far, a tweet has been her only comment on the controversy. She did not address the issue Saturday night during an event in Coral Gables, Fla., for the Clinton Global Initiative University.

One of Ms. Clinton’s predecessors, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, said Sunday he has retained none of the emails sent from his personal email account during his tenure at the department in the first George W. Bush administration.

“I don’t have any to turn over,” he said on Sunday. “I did not keep a cache of them. I did not print them off.”

Mr. Powell added: “A lot of the emails that came out of my personal account went into the State Department system. They were addressed to State Department employees and the State.gov domain. But I don’t know if the servers [for] the State Department captured those or not.”

Mr. Powell said all the emails from his account were unclassified and most were “pretty benign, so I’m not terribly concerned even if they were able to recover them.”

Ms. Feinstein appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Mr. Gowdy was on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” and Mr. Powell spoke on ABC’s “This Week.”

Ms. Clinton’s appearance at the university comes as she is also under fire for her family foundation’s acceptance of millions of dollars in donations from Middle Eastern countries known for violence against women and for denying them many basic freedoms.

Republicans quickly zeroed in on the apparent contradiction. Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard chief, told a crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference last month that Clinton “tweets about women’s rights in this country and takes money from governments that deny women the most basic human rights.”

And on Wednesday, the Republican National Committee released a biting video showing President Barack Obama calling political donations from foreign sources “a threat to our democracy” — and Clinton smiling next to several Middle East leaders.

On Saturday, Mr. Clinton felt compelled to defend the foundation’s fundraising.

“Do we agree with everything they do? No,” Mr. Clinton said. “You’ve got to decide when you do this work whether it will do more good than harm if someone helps you from another country,” he added.

First Published: March 9, 2015, 3:33 a.m.