Leaked emails show turmoil on Clinton’s team.

On the day the news broke that Hillary Clinton had used a private email account as secretary of state, the man who would soon be named to chair her presidential campaign fired off a note of distress, venting frustration about some of Clinton’s closest aides.

“Speaking of transparency, our friends Kendall, Cheryl and Phillipe sure weren’t forthcoming on the facts here,” John Podesta complained in the March 2015 note, referring to Clinton’s personal lawyer, David Kendall, as well as former State Department staffers Cheryl Mills and Philippe Reines.

“Why didn’t they get this stuff out like 18 months ago? So crazy,” replied Neera Tanden, a longtime Podesta friend who also has worked for Clinton. Then, answering her own question, Tanden wrote again: “I guess I know the answer. They wanted to get away with it.”

The exchange, found in hacked emails from Podesta’s account and released Tuesday by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, provides a striking window into how the revelation of Clinton’s email setup roiled her nascent campaign team in the weeks before its official April 2015 kickoff.

The emails show that while aides struggled to get past the public controversy, they also expressed exasperation at each other and, at times, at Clinton — both for her decision to use the server and for the way she handled questions about it. Several exchanges illustrate fears among some top advisers that Clinton and other aides were demonstrating the very traits that polls suggested made her vulnerable: a penchant for secrecy and a hesitancy to admit fault or error.

“We’ve taken on a lot of water that won’t be easy to pump out of the boat,” Podesta wrote to Tanden in September 2015, at a time when Clinton’s campaign feared that Vice President Joe Biden was about to enter the race for the Democratic nomination. “Most of that has to do with terrible decisions made pre-campaign, but a lot has to do with her instincts.”

Tanden responded, “Almost no one knows better (than) me that her instincts can be terrible.”

Tanden and Kendall declined to comment. Neither Reines nor a lawyer for Mills responded to requests for comment.

Clinton’s campaign has largely declined to comment on the WikiLeaks emails, which U.S. officials say were stolen through hacks of Democratic groups and leaders orchestrated by the Russian government. Clinton aides have declined to authenticate the emails.

Instead, Clinton spokesman Glen Caplin on Tuesday responded to questions about the internal campaign struggles revealed in the emails by attacking GOP nominee Donald Trump for his recent comments disputing U.S. government findings that the Kremlin was behind the hacks and for “cheering on WikiLeaks’ Russian-directed propaganda.”

Though the WikiLeaks disclosures have not contained the sort of campaign-shaking bombshell that some Trump backers had hoped for, the Podesta emails have provided an almost unprecedented historical archive of the inner workings of a major-party presidential campaign.

The emails also show a fondness among Clinton’s staff for her strengths and genuine enthusiasm when she did well in interviews or other public appearances. After Clinton appeared on “Face the Nation” in September 2015, an ally wrote to Podesta to praise her appearance. “Thought she was really good. Really good,” he wrote, before adding: “She sometimes laughs a little too hard at jokes that aren’t that funny. Other than that.”

Podesta responded with humor: “Laughing too hard,” he wrote, “is her authentic weirdness.”