Hillary Clinton to testify before Benghazi panel in October

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

The committee did not immediately confirm the date for the former secretary of state's appearance.

Campaign spokesman Nick Merrill said the Democratic candidate's testimony will 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 chairman, Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., 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. Gowdy's committee is investigating the deaths of U.S. ambassador and three other Americans in the attack on the diplomatic facility in Libya. At the time, Clinton was the country's top diplomat.

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 U.S. 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.

Associated Press writer Matthew Daly contributed to this report.