WASHINGTON — Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller blamed hackers and then an overzealous staffer for a tweet from his campaign account that called Hillary Clinton a "c---."

The tweet referred to presidential poll results in Pennsylvania: "TRUMP 44" and "C--- 43."

Although agency spokesman Mark Loeffler originally said he believed the account had been hacked, it had been issuing nearly identical tweets for many hours before the tweet that used the C-word. Loeffler speculated that a hacker might be trying to make Miller — "and by extension, Donald Trump" — look bad.

Soon after, Miller told another reporter that a staffer had copied and pasted the tweet without proofreading it thoroughly.

Eventually, Loeffler and Miller got their stories straight.

"The campaign was retweeting information on Twitter today and inadvertently retweeted a tweet that they were not aware contained a derogatory term," Loeffler said. "The tweet was taken down as soon as possible. Commissioner Miller finds the term vulgar and offensive and apologizes to anyone who may have seen it."

Asked why he said the account had been hacked before confirming that was the case, Loeffler chalked it up to internal miscommunication.

"I think that was the information that we thought at the time," Loeffler said. "Once we got everybody in the room at the same time, we found out they had been copying and pasting these tweets and just were not paying enough close attention to what we were pasting."

When pressed about why the campaign Twitter account repeated the alleged hack as fact, Loeffler said, "I don't know. I can't speak for the campaign."

The staffer who published the tweet would not be fired, Loeffler said.

Miller has a history of courting controversy on his social media accounts. Last year, he shared a post calling for the United States to bomb "the Muslim world," although he later attributed the post to a staffer. On another occasion, he compared Syrian refugees to rattlesnakes.

Miller, who in recent days has emerged as one of Trump's most vocal Texas surrogates, has been tweeting rapidly for the last 24 hours, sharing poll results that show Clinton trailing Trump and sharing rumors about FBI Director James Comey.

But all those tweets were sent by staffers, Miller told The Dallas Morning News on Tuesday.

"I've been in meetings all day, I didn't have time to post anything," he said. "The problem with Hillary Clinton is her policies, not her gender."

Although Miller reiterated that the tweet was vulgar and offensive, he said he would not draw a connection between its language and the language Trump once used to describe grabbing women by their genitals.

"That's not what this is about," Miller said. "That story's been beat to death. It's old news."

The Texas Democratic Party was quick to condemn Miller's remarks.

"It's not about one tweet, it's about a consistent pattern where the Republican Party fails to show even the most basic sense of human decency," wrote Crystal Perkins, executive director of the Texas Democratic Party. "While Sid Miller's disgusting tweet is now deleted, the hate toward woman and Texas' diverse new majority in the Republican Party persists."

Gov. Greg Abbott also criticized the tweet's contents.

"The language is reprehensible and it is an embarrassment," he said in a prepared statement. "No true Texas gentleman would ever talk this way."

Last week, Miller mocked the Clinton team in another tweet for being overly cautious about the Democratic candidate's Twitter account.

"My thoughts are my own," he wrote. "Healthy as a bull here."