Hillary Clinton's Deleted Emails Were Individually Reviewed After All, Spokesman Says

— -- How exactly did Hillary Clinton's team decide which of her emails should be saved and which ones should be deleted?

Three days after Time Magazine initially reported on Team Clinton’s review process to determine which of her emails were work-related and which were personal, the former secretary of state's people are now saying the examination did include opening and reading each email.

They did not confirm or deny Time's reporting for three days, with no explanation for why it took so long to clarify their deletion process.

Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill has released a statement saying that “in wanting the public to understand how robust of a search was conducted, the fact sheet laid out several examples of the methods used by the reviewers to double and triple check they were capturing everything."

The “fact sheet” refers to a question-and-answer document given out after the news conference last week.

The statement continues: "It was not meant to be taken as a list of every approach performed to ensure thoroughness. Those subsequent steps were in addition to reading them all, not in lieu of reading them all. (No different than our explaining such terms were used but not listing every search term used.) We simply took for granted that reading every single email came across as the most important, fundamental and exhaustive step that was performed. The fact sheet should have been clearer every email was read, which we are doing now.”

The big headline from Clinton’s news conference Tuesday was that, although she claims to have turned over all work-related emails, she deleted the rest of her emails and it appears they are gone forever.

A Time magazine cover story about the email scandal released last week reported: "This review did not involve opening and reading each email. Instead, Clinton’s lawyers created a list of names and keywords related to her work and searched for those. Slightly more than half the total cache -- 31,830 emails -- did not contain any of the search terms, according to Clinton’s staff, so they were deemed to be 'private, personal records.'”Clinton's team is now saying this is not true.

Time didn't disclose how it determined that each email wasn't opened individually, but says it seemed to be consistent with a written explanation provided by Clinton's spokesman after the news conference this week.During the news conference, Clinton did not go into the details of how the review was conducted, but said it was “thorough” and that she went “above and beyond” what she was required to do in turning over many of her emails to the State Department.

"We went through a thorough process to identify all of my work-related emails and deliver them to the State Department," she said, adding that all other emails were personal and pertained to matters such as "yoga routines," "family vacations," and "planning Chelsea's wedding."

But later, after the news conference, Clinton’s team distributed a lengthy question-and-answer document that detailed the “multi-step” process. The process appeared to have included an extensive, nuanced search of Clinton’s inbox, but the document did not make clear how many of the emails were opened and read in the review.

Today, however, Clinton's team said that all the emails were opened and read.