Hillary Clinton is engaged in a war of words with the House GOP Benghazi panel
Clinton's team slammed the Benghazi panel on Wednesday for allegedly taking her comments out of context while accusing her of lying in a nationally televised interview.
"That was not accurate," Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill told Business Insider in a statement.
Merrill was referring to a statement made by Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-South Carolina), the chair of the select committee. Earlier in the day, Gowdy released a March subpoena issued to Clinton that he said showed she gave an "inaccurate" answer during an interview with CNN.
Gowdy pointed to a Tuesday exchange between Clinton and interviewer Brianna Keilar, during which she said she "never had a subpoena."
Here's the exchange:
CLINTON: Previous secretaries of state have said they did the same thing. And people across the government knew that I used one device. Maybe it was because I am not the most technically capable person and wanted to make it as easy as possible.
KEILAR: But you said they did the same thing. That they used a personal server and while facing a subpoena deleted emails.
CLINTON: You know, you're starting with so many assumptions there. I've never had a subpoena. There is - again, let's take a deep breath here. Everything I did was permitted by law and regulation. I had one device. When I mailed anybody in the government it would go into the government's system. Now, I didn't have to turn over anything. I chose to turn over 55,000 pages because I wanted to go above and beyond what was expected of me because I knew the vast majority of everything that was official already was in the State Department system.
But Merrill insisted Clinton was answering the question after a "suggestion was made that a subpoena was pending at the time."
Merrill also noted that Gowdy did not issue the subpoena until months after Clinton had reviewed thousands of emails sent and received from a personal email account on a private server during her time as secretary of state.
"She was asked about her decision to not to retain her personal emails after providing all those that were work-related, and the suggestion was made that a subpoena was pending at the time. That was not accurate," Merrill said.
"In fact, Trey Gowdy did not issue a subpoena until March, months after she she'd done that review," he continued. "Further, the subpoena was specifically asking for documents pertaining to Libya and the attacks on our facility in Benghazi, documents which, along with tens of thousands of others, she had already given to the Department of State."
Clinton's confidantes and her recently formed campaign have long portrayed the select committee's work as a political witch hunt aimed at her 2016 presidential ambitions.
Clinton revealed in March that she deleted about 30,000 emails from her time in office, describing them as "personal" and saying she had "no reason to keep them." The Department of State has released a first batch of the 30,000 emails she turned over to the department - totaling nearly 3,000 pages - from her time as secretary late last month.
House Speaker John Boehner (R-South Carolina) established the select committee on Benghazi in May 2014 to investigate the 2012 terror attacks in Benghazi, during which four Americans died, including the US ambassador.