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A visibly angry Clinton tore into the Republican-led Select Committee on Benghazi when she was asked how she would react to hypothetical GOP leaders facing scrutiny over their own government email use.
"Look at the situation they chose to exploit, to go after me for political reasons: the death of four Americans in Benghazi. I knew the ambassador. I identified him. I asked him to go there. I asked the president to nominate him," she said.
Clinton, the Democratic presidential front-runner, has struggled to answer questions over her own email use in recent months. Clinton exclusively used a private email server while at the State Department, and the FBI is investigating whether any information was mishandled in connection to the account.
She long dismissed the scrutiny but, after she tumbled a bit in polls, recently started apologizing and opening up her campaign to the media.
But House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-California), the front-runner to become the next speaker, handed Clinton and her campaign a new tool with which to go on the offensive last week.
During a Fox News interview, McCarthy seemed to tout the House Benghazi committee's role in instigating email-related revelations that tore down Clinton's poll numbers - instead of the committee's role in investigating the 2011 attack on the diplomatic compound in Libya. Democrats pounced and said the comment exposed the committee as a partisan sham.
Clinton agreed with the criticism during her Monday "Today" interview and suggested that the committee should be shut down.
"This committee was set up, as they have admitted, for the purpose of making a partisan, political issue out of the deaths of four Americans," she said. "I would have never done that! And if I were president - and there were Republicans or Democrats who were thinking about that - I would have done everything to shut it down."
Watch below:
A visibly angry @HillaryClinton talks Benghazi investigation with @SavannahGuthrie #HillaryTODAYhttps://t.co/YwtCistKmy
- TODAY (@TODAYshow) October 5, 2015