This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

Hillary Clinton will testify on 22 October before the House committee investigating the deaths of four Americans in the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, her presidential campaign said on Saturday.

Hillary Clinton email inquiry not linked to criminal wrongdoing, official says Read more

The committee, however, said no date for the former secretary of state’s appearance had been set.

“Secretary Clinton’s campaign may want to reach out to her lawyer, Mr David Kendall, with whom the committee has had ongoing conversations,” the committee said in a statement. “As of last night, Mr Kendall was still negotiating conditions for her appearance,.”

Campaign spokesman Nick Merrill said the Democratic candidate’s testimony would be public. Clinton’s lawyers and the Republican-led committee have been negotiating over the terms under which she might appeal before the committee.

The committee chairman, South Carolina Republican Trey Gowdy, initially requested a private interview.

The testimony, in the months leading up to the first presidential nominating contests in Iowa and New Hampshire, is likely to reverberate through the 2016 race, in which Clinton is the clear frontrunner for the Democratic nomination.

Gowdy’s committee is investigating the deaths of the US ambassador, Chris Stevens, and three other Americans in the 11 September 2012 attack on a diplomatic facility in Libya. At the time, Clinton was secretary of state in the Obama administration.

Chris Stevens, US ambassador to Libya, killed in Benghazi attack Read more

In recent months, the inquiry has devolved into a political fight over Clinton’s emails and private computer server. Republicans have seized upon revelations that Clinton chose to use a private email server, instead of a government one, and later deleted thousands of emails she said were not related to her work.

On Friday, government investigators disclosed that they had recently alerted the Justice Department to the potential compromise of classified information from Clinton’s server.

The inspector general of the US intelligence community sent a memo to members of Congress saying that “potentially hundreds of classified emails” were among those that Clinton had provided to the State Department.

Clinton last testified at two congressional hearings in January 2013, when she denied that the Obama administration tried to mislead the country about the attacks. She took responsibility for the department’s missteps and said it was attempting to strengthen security at diplomatic posts worldwide.

