In former special council Mueller’s testimony before Congress, Mueller used the response “I take your question” a few times when he could not answer. This response isn’t heard often and as such news articles had experts explain it.

For example, Quartz had a legal expert in stating:

M. Tia Johnson, a visiting law professor at Georgetown Law School and former assistant secretary for legal affairs at the US Department of Homeland Security, tells Quartz that this is a standard legal response.

“‘I take your question’ is used often when the witness doesn’t know the answer to the question,” she said. It’s distinct from a straight “no” because it indicates that the answer may well be knowable, just that this witness doesn’t know it.

I have searched on Google for this exact phrasing before Mueller’s testimony, but the results are slightly different phrasings, for example:

I take your question seriously

I take your question to be (…)

I’ve also looked at Google Ngram which didn’t yield many relevant results either. Many references come from NYMag which has some coverage of the recent Mueller hearing on older pages as well.

My question is about the etymology of “I take your question” as a response explained in the quote from Quartz. What is its origin?

Since there is so little I can find about it on the internet (pre-dating the hearing), I am wondering if anyone can shed some more light on it.