Senator Harry Reid
Senator Harry ReidReuters

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid on Wednesday said the Republican field for president in 2016 is full of “losers”.

Speaking with CNBC, Reid called his Republican counterpart Mitch McConnell “a lump of coal” and said he does not really care who wins the Republican nomination for president.

“I think they’re all losers,” he said, adding that he likes Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, after she announced this week that she would be running in 2016.

Candidates on the Republican side include Marco Rubio, who announced his candidacy this week, and Ted Cruz, who made his announcement in March. Also expected to run are former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Kentucky's Rand Paul, a libertarian-leaning lawmaker whose father Ron Paul ran for president several times.

Reid said in the interview that he would not criticize McConnell for sending a letter to governors saying that the Environmental Protection Agency’s climate regulations were illegal, because he “comes from a coal state. I don’t mean to be mean spirited, but he is a lump of coal. He believes that coal is the salvation of the world. I don’t believe that.”

The outgoing senator also accused Senator John McCain of having a bad temper, saying, “It wasn’t long ago he came to me on the Senate floor, and he said, ‘What you just did, I’m going to come to the floor and kick the s--- out of you.’”

“And I said to him, ‘John, if I were in your position I would do the same thing,’” added Reid.