The same day Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server came to light, her campaign chairman, John Podesta, told her former chief of staff to "dump all those emails," the New York Post reported Tuesday.
The exchange was revealed in hacked emails from Podesta's account that WikiLeaks released Tuesday. The U.S. government has accused Russia of penetrating American political networks to influence the 2016 election.
Podesta instructed Clinton's former chief of staff at the State Department, Cheryl Mills, to delete the emails when news of her private server became public, according to the Post.
Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman was so eager to get past the issue of her emails that he ordered they be dealt with "sooner than later" when a bombshell report revealed Clinton's use of a private computer server while U.S. secretary of state, WikiLeaks revealed Tuesday.
John Podesta sent the message to Cheryl Mills the evening of March 2, 2015, hours after the New York Times reported that Clinton might have violated federal records requirements by using the server, according to the latest batch of Podesta's hacked emails.
The email exchange between Podesta and Mills went as follows:
"Not to sound like Lanny, but we are going to have to dump all those emails so better to do so sooner than later," Podesta wrote.
"Think you just got your new nick name," Mills responded.
Podesta was apparently referring in his email to Lanny Davis, a lawyer who served as special counsel to former President Bill Clinton.
Hillary Clinton's email scandal started back in December 2014, when she was forced to hand over to the FBI more than 55,000 pages of work-related emails. Clinton deleted about 30,000 emails from her server, which she said were of a personal nature.
According to the Post, Democratic allies say Podesta was "blindsided" by the email issue and wanted to be transparent about it.