Mr Key produced the email thread as evidence that the same day the Henry inquiry received the journalist's phone records from Parliamentary Service, it replied: "We did not request the second report you've attached here ie the one showing all calls to and from the numbers of interest. We're not interested in looking at that.''
But the Opposition has seized upon it as showing that Mr Key's inquiry had requested the information.
The email was from the administrator of the David Henry inquiry (Isaac Hollis) to Parliamentary Service which is responsible for the running of Parliament, including phones, emails systems and swipe card access.
The email was sent on May 30 and the subject line read "request for ministers' landline call logs.''
Part of the edited email that Mr Key tabled says: "We are interested in any contact between the below Ministers' personal landlines, and these numbers:
1.A Vance landline
2.A Vance extension
3.A Vance mobile
The ministers listed were those who had had advance copies of Rebecca Kitteridge's report into the GCSB, which was leaked to Andrea Vance and which cost United Future leader Peter Dunne his ministerial post.
The ministers listed were: Bill English, Steven Joyce, Judith Collins, Christopher Finlayson, Jonathan Coleman, Murray McCully, Anne Tolley, Amy Adams, Maurice Williamson, Gerry Brownlee.
Mr Key also confirmed that his chief of staff, Wayne Eagleson, had emailed the offices of the ministers who had received an early copy of the Kitteridge report into the GCSB to inform them that Mr Key had wanted them to comply with the inquiry.
Mr Eagleson had also emailed the general manager of Parliamentary Service on May 9 "to confirm that I wished him to make available the inquiry records in relation to ministers and their staff.''
"At no point did he ask for information about journalists.''
Labour and Green MPs suggested in Parliament that the wording suggested that the wording of the request from the Henry inquiry - "contact between'' - meant communications to and from Vance, not just telephone traffic from ministers to Vance.
Labour leader David Shearer asked Mr Key in Parliament whether the term "contact between'' meant both parties.
Mr Key said it what it meant was not the journalist's records: "It means the phone contact between the minister and the journalist.''
Green co-leader Russel Norman questioned Mr Key about the fact that the inquiry, acting under his mandate, had asked for and received the journalist's building access records and monitored her activities.
Mr Key: "I have made it quite clear that I find the actions that took place with regard to this totally inappropriate. I made that clear quite some weeks ago.
"But I also make it quite clear that at no point did the terms of reference indicate that a journalist's activities were part of this, and if they were, then the member himself would have said something about it and members of the media would have said something about it. Nobody understood it to include journalists.''
- by Audrey Young of the New Zealand Herald
