Hillary Clinton pushed back on criticism this week from reporters and media outlets who have accused the former secretary of state of lying about her handling of classified emails.

At a forum hosted by a pair of minority journalist associations in Washington, D.C. Friday, Clinton said the three emails uncovered by the FBI that had been marked classified were not stamped with large, prominent markings, and argued she should not have been expected to recognize them as classified documents.

"You know that I sent over 30,000 emails to the State Department that were work-related emails. [FBI] Director [James] Comey said that only three out of 30,000 had anything resembling classified markers," Clinton said.

She said classified documents "usually" have a "big heading on the top" to denote their classification level.

"In questioning, Director Comey made the point that the three emails out of the 30,000 did not have the appropriate markings, and it was therefore reasonable to conclude that anyone, including myself, would have not suspected that they were classified," Clinton said.

Fact-checkers have taken Clinton to task for maintaining that she never sent or received any material that was marked classified after Comey revealed under oath that his agents had recovered three emails that were indeed marked classified at the time they were sent.

Clinton doubled down on her assertion that Comey's testimony proved she had been honest about her email use and did not, as many of her critics claim, expose her previous statements as lies.

During a hearing before the House Oversight Committee last month, the FBI director said Clinton's public statements were consistent with what she told investigators behind closed doors, but admitted that the evidence uncovered in the course of the year-long probe contradicted some of those statements.