After Hillary Clinton denied that she had been subpoenaed by the Benghazi select committee, Chairman Trey Gowdy (R., S.C.) countered that she had been personally subpoenaed. Reporting on Gowdy’s contradiction of Clinton, CNN’s Jake Tapper added that the committee subpoenaed Clinton “the moment Benghazi cmte learned of personal email/server.”

In a post published earlier this afternoon, I took issue with Tapper’s tweet because it is not true that Gowdy issued the subpoena as soon as the committee learned about then-Secretary Clinton’s use of a personal email system to conduct government business. I also noted that while Tapper did not quote Gowdy as having made this claim, he did phrase his tweet in a way that appeared to attribute the claim to Gowdy. I expressed doubt that Gowdy had made such a statement since he has previously admitted that the committee did not issue the subpoena for more than six months after learning of Clinton’s use of private email.

On Twitter, Tapper explained that he took the claim about immediately issuing the subpoena directly from the statement Gowdy issued after Clinton’s denial. He very fairly criticized me for not finding Gowdy’s statement and reading it for myself before suggesting that Tapper had gotten it wrong.

Now that I’ve done that, it is clear that Tapper got it wrong … though this is attributable at least as much to the Jesuitical phrasing of Gowdy’s statement as to Tapper’s misreading of it.

If you scrutinize the statement, you find that, contrary to what Tapper reported, Gowdy did not claim to have subpoenaed Clinton the moment the committee learned about Clinton’s use of personal email and a personal server. Here is the pertinent part of Gowdy’s statement (the italics are mine):

[Mrs. Clinton] was personally subpoenaed the moment the Benghazi Committee became aware of her exclusive use of personal email and a server, and that the State department was not the custodian of her official record.

As I noted in the aforementioned post, when the New York Times broke the story about Mrs. Clinton’s private email system in March, Gowdy told Politico that the committee had known about it for more than six months. I then faulted Gowdy for not issuing a subpoena to Clinton immediately upon learning that she was using a private email system for the blatant purpose of defeating government recordkeeping requirements.

When asked about my criticism, Gowdy at times conceded that it had been an error to wait so long. Yet, plainly sensitive to the appearance (or perhaps the reality) that it was the Times report that finally spurred him to issue the subpoena, Gowdy also tried to justify his delay by implying that the State Department had misled him into believing that it possessed all the relevant emails and was cooperating with the committee in good faith. It was only in March, Gowdy claimed, that he realized the State Department did not have all the relevant emails – i.e., that Clinton was the real custodian. This, he rationalized, was the revelation that made the subpoena necessary.

As I’ve contended before, this is bogus. There was no good reason for Gowdy not to issue the subpoena the moment he found out about the private email system. The fact that Mrs. Clinton was using a “clintonemail.com” server – when she not only was supposed to use the government system but was the Department head responsible for ensuring that everyone at State used the government system – would have led any good investigator to suspect that she had not turned over all relevant email. That would have been doubly clear once the committee knew that Clinton’s top aides were also using the private Clinton email system for State Department business.

Given Mrs. Clinton’s history of misleading statements – on Benghazi and much else – no good investigator would have assumed that she was cooperating in the government’s preservation of her emails after she had taken pains to defeat the government’s acquisition of her emails. Plus, issuing a subpoena immediately to Mrs. Clinton personally would not have prevented Gowdy from continuing to work cooperatively with the State Department; it would simply have been the prudent – and routine – thing to do.

Gowdy should have subpoenaed Clinton months before he did. He failed to do that. He now wants to have it both ways: He wants to appear righteously indignant over Clinton’s obstruction of his investigation, but he does not want to draw attention to his lack of urgency in conducting the investigation. The blather about suddenly realizing in March that the State Department was not the custodian of Clinton’s private emails is his way of trying to thread that needle.

Jake Tapper is right that I should have read Gowdy’s statement, but I’d respectfully suggest that he should have read Gowdy’s fine print.