I guess a not enough educated support person can create bad press pretty quick.
Apparently the support person was parroting the official company policy. xploited (CLAM dev) tells me he spoke to bittrex-richie (the real one!) who told him that their lawyers won't let them comment on whether they control particular crypto addresses or not. Which sucks, but at least it's not the support person's fault.
There are a number of wallet explorers that tag which Bitcoin addresses belong to semi-major sites/exchanges/ect, I don't see why someone couldn't do a similar analysis for CLAMs or at least for their CLAM addresses. I wouldn't think it would be difficult to find the majority of their CLAM addresses with blockchain analysis.