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"This was fog of war. This was complicated," Hillary Clinton said. | AP Photo Clinton: Mother of Benghazi victim 'wrong'

Hillary Clinton said during Wednesday's debate that she had not lied to families of the victims of the 2012 Benghazi attacks, saying she sympathizes with those families while unequivocally denouncing criticism from one victim's mother as "absolutely wrong."

“You know, look, I feel a great deal of sympathy for the families of the four brave Americans that we lost at Benghazi," Clinton said. "And I certainly can’t even imagine the grief that she has for losing her son. But she’s wrong. She’s absolutely wrong. I and everybody in the administration, all the people she named — the president, the vice president, [then-United Nations Ambassador] Susan Rice — we were scrambling to get information that was changing literally by the hour."

Co-moderator Jorge Ramos' question circled around October 2015 comments from Benghazi victim Sean Smith's mother, who accused Clinton of lying about the genesis of the attacks to the American people while telling her daughter via email that a terrorist group was behind the attack.

"Well, Jorge, that makes my point," Clinton said, adding that at the time she emailed her daughter, a terrorist group had just claimed credit for executing the attack. The YouTube video titled “Innocence of Muslims,” which was perceived as an offensive portrayal of the prophet Muhammad and his life, "did play a role" in the attacks, Clinton added, saying that a captured terrorist involved in plotting the attack confirmed this.

"This was fog of war. This was complicated," Clinton said.

Clinton then blasted the politicization of Benghazi, ticking through a list of tragedies from the 1983 bombing of a U.S. Marines barracks in Lebanon to the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania to 9/11.

"I wish that there could be an easy answer at the time," Clinton said, but the information kept changing.