Hillary Clinton rarely stumbled during Thursday's marathon House Select Committee on Benghazi hearing, but as the session wore on, some of the Democratic presidential candidate's comments about her private email setup mangled the facts and fueled lingering questions about how her team decided which messages to turn over to her former agency.

One of Clinton's assertions fell into doubt Friday as the State Department said it was unaware of any basis for her claim that the agency "had between 90 and 95 percent of all [her] work-related emails" even before she turned over 54,000 pages of records last December.


"I'm not aware that we have given that figure," State spokesman Mark Toner told reporters on Friday. "We've not been able to confirm that. I not sure where that information comes from."

Pressed by House Benghazi Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy on the issue late in the 11-hour hearing, Clinton said her former agency made the assessment that nearly all her emails were already on file.

"We learned that from the State Department and their analysis of the emails that were already on the system. We were trying to help them close some gaps that they had," she said.

In a fact sheet released in March, Clinton's office said about 90 percent of the emails she turned over were produced because they contained "state.gov" or other official federal government addresses. Her team did not assert at that time that State had concluded it already had 90 percent of her work-related emails.

Asked about Clinton's assertion at the hearing, a Clinton campaign aide returned to the March statement and referenced new disclosures about weaknesses in State's recordkeeping system, but notably declined to repeat her new claim.

"Of the more than 30,000 emails that Secretary Clinton provided to the State Department last year, more than 90 percent were sent to or from a state.gov email address," said the aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "That is observable by looking at the emails that were provided for release by the Department. These messages would have been captured in the State Department's record system. It has since been learned that the State Department's archiving system did not maintain every email, but that does not change that these messages were captured by State's system and thus should have been available."

State officials have said that their electronic record-keeping practices at the time were lax and that sending or receiving an email on an official account did not guarantee that it would be archived. In fact, automatic archiving for senior State officials, other than the secretary did not begin until February of this year, officials said.

"Just because an email is sent or received from a '.gov' address doesn't mean it is automatically being archived somewhere. That is a common misperception made by people employed at all levels of government," said Jason R. Baron, a former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration.

Baron also said it is doubtful State had the ability to reach the conclusion Clinton claimed about how much of her work-related email the agency was storing.

"I do not believe State is in the position to give a precise percentage like that because they honestly wouldn't know how many of the secretary's emails did, in fact, make their way into an official record-keeping system," he said.

During her testimony Friday, Clinton also sowed confusion by providing differing descriptions of her involvement in the process of reviewing her private emails in response to an official State Department request last October to turn over all official government records in her possession.

At one point , she stressed her detachment from the decisions about what to turn over, while at another juncture, she suggested she was effectively sorting her emails during her tenure by forwarding work-related ones to aides and not forwarding others. GOP lawmakers have said informal Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal provided 15 email exchanges to the committee that Clinton did not turn over to the State Department.

Clinton told Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) that her lawyers made the decision on what to deem work-related and what was considered private. "They did all of that, and I did not look over their shoulders, because I thought it would be appropriate for them to conduct that search, and they did," she said.

However, minutes later, Clinton appeared to tell Gowdy that any differences in what was turned over were due to her effectively sorting the emails on the fly during her time as secretary.

"He had some that I didn't have, and I had some that he didn't have," the former secretary said of Blumenthal. "I was under no obligation to make any of his emails available unless I decided they were work-related. And the ones that I decided that were work-related, I forwarded to the state.gov accounts of the people with whom I worked."

When Gowdy asserted there was "no ambiguity" that the messages Blumenthal's attorney turned over related to work, Clinton suggested there was.

"They were from a personal friend ... not any government official," she said. "I determined on the basis of looking at them, what I thought was work-related and what wasn't. And some, I didn't even have time to read, Mr. Chairman."

Clouding the situation even more, a review of the messages turned over to State which originated from Blumenthal shows that Clinton's team turned over some that she forwarded to government colleagues, but also some that she does not appear to have forwarded. Clinton has said her team erred on the side of disclosure and has noted that the National Archives has determined that 1,200 emails Clinton produced were actually entirely personal.

"We sent so many that some were going to be returned because they were clearly not work-related. We did our best," Clinton said.

Baron said the significance of Clinton's over-production was open to interpretation.

"The fact ... might indicate that the secretary and her staff were being conscientious in turning over more than they had to — but it also raises a question as to whether the individuals making the decisions on what to turn over were aware of and were adhering to NARA’s regulations on what emails were official and what were personal in nature," he said. "Regrettably, there are still some legitimate issues here caused by the secretary’s initial decision to adopt a highly unusual and unorthodox arrangement for recordkeeping."

"One consequence of that is when she was finally asked to return a large volume of official records in her custody, she and her lawyers had to make decisions on what were official records and what were personal records to be deleted. We just don’t know how those decisions were actually implemented, and the remarks the secretary made yesterday unfortunately muddy the waters a little bit," Baron added.

Despite Clinton's verbal meandering Thursday about how some Blumenthal emails were deemed work-related and some were not, the Clinton aide said Friday that all Blumenthal emails Clinton had access to last fall were turned over to State.

"Any emails from Sid that she had, she provided to the State Department," the aide said, adding that the sifting process was done by Clinton's attorneys, not by her. "As Clinton said, her lawyers carried out the task of sorting potentially work-related emails from the personal ones."

Another indication that the email issue is certain to linger for Clinton came at a court hearing Friday in one of dozens of lawsuits in which news organizations and conservative groups are seeking copies of emails and other records sent or received by Clinton and her top aides.

A Justice Department lawyer provided figures indicating the State Department might take more than the next year to complete disclosure of tens of thousands of pages of emails between former Clinton communications aide Philippe Reines and several dozen news organizations.

Justice Department attorney Stephen Elliott said about 81,000 electronic files are being prepared for release along with about 16,000 pages of emails that Reines turned over from his private email account at State's request.

While State has only released 71 pages of the messages up to this point, Eliiott told U.S. District Court Judge Ketanji Jackson that the agency will ramp up disclosure to 4,800 pages per month beginning in November. The plan appears to call for the releases to continue for well over a year and perhaps for several years.

It's "very difficult to say how long this will take," Elliott told the judge. "The 4,800 pages is definitely an upper limit of what the State Department is capable of."

"This sounds like it could take years," said Brad Moss, an attorney representing media outlet Gawker in the Freedom of Information Act case. "We have no idea when this is going to end."

Moss quipped that while the information might be of interest to voters in the 2016 presidential race, the disclosures might end up impacting the 2020 election as well. "We could be into a second term, if Hillary Clinton is elected and reelected, before this gets done," he said.

In August, State told the court in a written report that only about 18,000 of the 81,000 files the agency found were likely responsive to Gawker's request for all emails between Reines and 37 news organizations. It is unclear why the government is now indicating that the larger number is now in the pipeline for release.

The State Department initially said it had no records responsive to Gawker's request. However, after the controversy over Clinton's emails erupted, State said it had located some of Reines' state.gov emails and requested that he turn over work-related messages exchanged on his personal account. Reines sent 20 boxes of printed emails to the department in July and later turned them over in electronic form. Officials said most of the bulk was due to daily news clippings sent to his personal and official accounts.

There has been no explanation from State about why the first search for records came up with nothing. Elliott said the current process has been complicated by the fact that journalists often used their personal accounts to exchange emails with Reines, so the names of the news organizations often don't appear in the records. and the reporters' affiliations have to be determined from other sources.

Reines has said he rarely used his personal account for official business, was careful to forward or copy such messages to his state.gov account and does not know why State initially failed to locate them. He also said he could not prevent journalists who had his private email from using it to contact him.

Monthly releases of Clinton's emails ordered by another judge in a separate FOIA case are scheduled to continue through January, days before the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses.

