Highlights From the Clinton Campaign Emails: How to Deal With Sanders and Biden - NYTimes.com

cliRight Now:The New York Times is examining the emails and will be posting the results.

The latest trove of documents released by WikiLeaks includes thousands of pages of emails between John D. Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, and aides, Clinton family members and outside donors all angling for position and power within Mrs. Clinton’s then-nascent campaign.

Last week, a set of Mr. Podesta’s emails were disclosed that included potentially damaging excerpts from private paid speeches Mrs. Clinton delivered to Wall Street executives in which she praised “open trade and open borders” and lamented that her personal wealth made her “kind of far removed” from the struggles of the middle class.

The latest leaked emails show Mrs. Clinton’s campaign aides trying to grapple with that reality, and establish a campaign message that could position her, a career politician and Washington insider, as an appealing agent of change.

The Clinton campaign has not verified the authenticity of the emails, and a spokesman has pointed to Russian hackers who the United States government has said used WikiLeaks to release hacked documents that could help sway the election in Donald J. Trump’s favor.

Clinton advisers explored a campaign strategy at least two years before she entered the race.

Despite statements by Mrs. Clinton and her allies insisting she had not made up her mind about seeking the presidency in 2016, the emails reveal that her advisers had begun to test messages and contemplate a campaign strategy at least two years before she officially declared her candidacy in April 2015.

Mr. Podesta, who would become campaign chairman, and Robby Mook, the eventual campaign manager, grappled with how to best position Mrs. Clinton, a career politician, as a change agent, how much to play up the history-making potential of her candidacy and how to address anger over income inequality.

“Gender will be a big field and volunteer motivator, but it won’t close the deal,” Mr. Mook wrote to Mr. Podesta and Cheryl D. Mills, another Clinton adviser, in March 2014.

“The real challenge,” Ms. Mills wrote, “is that this likely will be when people want experience and we got so burned by that narrative” in the 2008 campaign against Barack Obama that “we won’t go back to it, even though it might be right for now.”

Emails reveal the care advisers took with every part of the campaign — right down to a single Twitter post.

The emails reveal the excruciating decision-making behind every step related to how Mrs. Clinton handled everything from her splashy campaign rollout speech on Roosevelt Island in June 2015 to a single Twitter post.

In one email chain from March 2015, four aides debated a Twitter post in which Mrs. Clinton would address for the first time revelations that she had used a private email server during her tenure at the State Department. “I want the public to see my email. I asked State to release them. They said they will review them for release as soon as possible,” the posteventually read.

That included their delight at an early ‘ad-libbing’ approach and jabs at President Obama.

“She smacked down POTUS on trade and kept kicking for a little bit,” Huma Abedin, a close aide, wrote on June 14, 2015, using an acronym for the president. “Worth looking at the transcript but this seemed to really work for this crowd.”

At the time, Mrs. Clinton was trying to craft herself as more of a populist, pointing to differences between her and Mr. Obama.

The aides also liked the personal details she shared. “She inserted some new applause lines and talked about Dorothy,” her mother, “in a more personal way that I’ve only heard talk about privately,” Ms. Abedin wrote.

Other emails show the anxiety that her team felt over making her opposition to the Keystone pipeline public.

Aides discussed leaking it after a meeting with labor leaders — so as not to undermine her “principled stand about not second-guessing the president in public.” Mr. Mook suggested that Mrs. Clinton time her announcement to “help distract” from the barrage of criticism surrounding her use of a private email server.

The emails show heightened awareness of her vulnerability to charges of flip-flopping and political maneuvering.

“She risks looking very political, especially on this,” wrote Joel Benenson, the chief strategist on the campaign.

Mrs. Clinton’s press secretary, Brian Fallon, felt that leaking her new position on Keystone “might achieve the same effect of getting her on the record on this issue, but with less perception that she is putting a finger to the wind.”

Clinton allies expressed concern in 2015 about a possible Biden run.

In 2015, the Clinton campaign had to deal with escalating chatter about a potential run by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Donors phoned in reports on Mr. Biden’s behind-the-scenes maneuvers to advisers like Neera Tanden, who relayed them back to Mr. Podesta. Steve Elmendorf, a longtime Clinton supporter, emailed her campaign manager to grouse about one supporter in particular: Linda Lipsen, head of the trial lawyers association.

“I get multiple freak-out calls every morning and I try to talk everyone off the ledge and not bug u all,” Mr. Elmendorf wrote. “But Linda is in a different category.” Ms. Lipsen had complained about not getting enough care from the campaign at a time when she was working members of her trade association and trying to keep them from considering Mr. Biden.

The Clinton camp seemed unprepared for the insurgent campaign of Bernie Sanders.

For all the planning, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign aides appeared blindsided by the popularity of Senator Bernie Sanders’s populist message in the Democratic primary. Concern over Mrs. Clinton’s economic message seemed to reach a breaking point after Mrs. Clinton lost to Mr. Sanders by 22 percentage points in the New Hampshire primary.

“Message needs to be more positive, upbeat, hopeful,” an adviser wrote to Mr. Podesta. “Bernie is saying we can change the world. Her msg is ‘No, we can’t’ because …”

The adviser expressed particular concern about young voters gravitating to Mr. Sanders’s promise for revolution. “Bernie’s ads feature young ppl saying why they are voting / supporting him,” she wrote. “Hillary’s ads need to be young people — all under 45 and a smattering of older ones — validating her.”

But the campaign did get a heads-up later from a D.N.C official about some of Sanders’s efforts.

In January, Donna Brazile, a vice chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, passed on an email from Mr. Sanders’s African-American outreach team about how it was planning to host a Twitter-related event.

“Thank you for the heads up on this, Donna,” responded Adrienne Elrod, one of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign aides.

Ms. Brazile, a longtime party operative, later replaced Debbie Wasserman Schultz on an interim basis as D.N.C. chairwoman on the eve of the party’s national convention, a change that came after leaked emails revealed that Democratic officials had conspired to harm Mr. Sanders’s bid for the party’s nomination.

Clinton’s team was keenly aware of how vulnerable her Wall Street ties made her appear next to Sanders.

Her aides decided in January that she should avoid talking about Wall Street at an event in Nevada during her primary fight with Mr. Sanders.

“Don’t know that it is most effective contrast for her,” wrote Jennifer Palmieri, the campaign’s communications director. “Seems like we are picking the fight he wants to have.”

In the fall and winter of 2011, an increasingly bitter dispute was breaking out between a top Clinton aide, Douglas J. Band, and Chelsea Clinton, over the blurred lines between the Clinton Foundation and Mr. Band’s consulting company, Teneo.

Ms. Clinton had sought to reorganize and professionalize the foundation, angering Mr. Band and a fellow longtime Clinton aide, Justin Cooper, who resisted. “Doug apparently kept telling my dad I was trying to push him out, take over,” Ms. Clinton told Mr. Podesta in a November 2011 email.

But the next month, Ms. Clinton was less understanding. In December, she emailed Mr. Podesta and several aides to Mrs. Clinton regarding a Clinton Foundation aide who worked for former President Bill Clinton. The aide, Ilya Aspis, had been calling members of Parliament in Britain “on behalf of President Clinton” for Teneo clients, including the chief executive of Dow Chemical.

She also mentions that another former White House aide, Sara Latham, had begun working for Teneo but then quit “because she was so upset, partly because of what Doug and Declan asked her to do/pretend was happening for their clients at Davos.” The reference appears to be to Declan Kelly, a co-founder of Teneo, though what Ms. Latham was asked to do remains unclear.