“Did you lie to” these families, he asked.

“She’s wrong, she’s absolutely wrong,” Clinton replied. “I and everybody in the administration, all the people she named, the president, the vice-president, Susan Rice, we were scrambling to get information that was changing literally by the hour. And when we had information, we made it public but then sometimes we had to go back and say we have new information that contradicts it.”

Clinton cited other terrorist attacks — the Marines barracks in Beirut, the embassy bombings in Africa, 9/11 — and lamented that “at no other time were those tragedies politicized.”