Hillary Clinton downloaded emails sent and received by her top staff from her failed run for the Presidency in 2008 to see who had been plotting against her, claims a blockbuster new book about the campaign.

The Democratic presidential candidate obtained the emails from her campaign server to see who had been disloyal and who had been leaking against her.

Armed with this she held meetings with the staffers to try to determine what went wrong during the election - with the aides apparently unaware she had been reading their messages.

The extraordinary claim puts the scandal over Clinton’s use of a personal email server, which dogged her presidential campaign, in a new light.

It also shows how little she trusted even those closest to her not to conspire against her behind her back.

In Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Election Campaign, political journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes claim that Clinton ‘learned about the power of digital snooping’ when she decided to do it herself after losing the Democratic ticket to Barack Obama in 2008.

New book Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign claims the scandal over Hillary's private server wasn't the only time she crossed the line

Hillary's top staff in her 2008 campaign included chief strategists Patti Solis Doyle and political director Guy Cecil. Shattered does not name whose emails Clinton asked for

‘She instructed a trusted aide to access (her) campaign server and download the messages sent and received by top staffers,' according to the authors.

The book explains that she was ‘conducting an autopsy’ and wanted an ‘honest accounting’ of what went on during the campaign.

‘She believed her campaign had failed her - not the other way around - and she wanted to ‘see who was talking to who, who was leaking to who’, a source familiar with the operation told Allen and Parnes.

During the post-election meetings with her staff in Washington ‘disloyalty and dysfunction’ were rarely far from Clinton’s mind.

According to Shattered: ‘The men and women she met with, apparently unaware she has access to their emails, were amazed that a woman who had been traveling the country in pursuit of the presidency had such a detailed grasp of the machinations at the campaign’s command center in the Washington suburbs’.

Shattered does not offer any examples of the emails that Clinton obtained.

Nor does it make clear if Hillary sorted personal emails her staff sent through their campaign email from professional ones.

Neera Tanden served as Hillary's the policy director in the 2008 campaign. Shattered does not reveal if Hillary obtained her emails from the campaign server.

During the scandal over her own email server in 2016 Clinton claimed that she did not hand over all her emails from Secretary of State because some were personal in nature.

Among those who worked on Clinton’s campaign in 2008 was Guy Cecil, her political director, Mark Penn, her chief strategist, Neera Tanden, the policy director, and chief strategist Patti Solis Doyle

One anonymous aide is quoted in Shattered as saying that they were surprised that Clinton had a ‘remarkably accurate’ idea of what was going on among her staff and that she had a ‘mosaic’ of information.

The email scandal - stemming from Clinton’s decision to install the private email server at her home in Chappaqua when she became Secretary of State instead of using her official account - dogged her campaign and led to an FBI investigation into whether she breached rules regarding the handling of classified information.

The book reveals that privately Obama was exasperated by the email scandal and thought that it amounted to 'political malpractice'.

Publicly he supported Clinton but privately he 'couldn't understand what possessed Hillary to set up the private email server'. Obama felt that Hillary's tactics were to 'obfuscate, deny and evade' were exactly the things which sank her in 2008 when she ran against him for the Presidency.

Obama 'said nothing of this to Hillary' but in the privacy of the West Wing he 'scratched his head or rolled his eyes'.

Mark Penn served as Hillary's chief strategist in her 2008 presidential bid. The book Shattered does not reveal which staffers were subject to her email search

President Clinton his then political pollster Mark Penn prior to the second presidential debate between the President and Senator Bob Dole in 1996

Last July FBI director James Comey initially said that she had not done so but branded her ‘extremely careless’.

Then a week before the election Comey revealed he was reopening the investigation, based on emails the FBI had obtained from the computer of Anthony Weiner in his own scandal - one revealed exclusively by DailyMail.com over his sexting with a then 15-year-old high school girl. The announcement caused Clinton’s poll numbers to drop and, she would later tell friends, cost her the election.

The investigation was later closed again.

A separate investigation by the State Department found that Clinton broke the rules by using her private email server instead of her official work account.

She was also investigated by the House Select Committee on Benghazi and the scandal was the subject of eight reporters by seven Congressional committees.

The drip drop of stories about the email server caused Clinton immense damage but Shattered argues that in the beginning she failed to realize how serious it was.

The book says that overall she was a ‘terrible judge of how her actions could backfire and turn into full blown scandals’.

The response of Clinton and her team ‘reflected an epic underestimation of an existential threat posed to her campaign’ because many people thought of her as a liar.

The biggest damage was done by Comey after the FBI investigation in which agents read through all 30,000 emails that she had turned over to the Department of State.

They found 110 emails contained classified information at the time they were sent or received, however they were not labelled as such at the time, meaning that Clinton could claim she was not aware they needed to be handled with care.

Obama was exasperated by the email scandal and thought that it amounted to 'political malpractice'

In his statement in July last year Comey said it was ‘especially concerning’ that seven email chains contained the highest level of classification because they were sent on such an unsecure email system.

Comey said that the investigation concluded that it was ‘possible that hostile actors gained access to her email system’, though he could not be sure.

Ultimately, Comey's announcement that the FBI was reopening the inesgation into Hillary's emails would be one of the factors leading to her defeat.Hillary's defeat.

The book describes how, on election night President Obama phoned Hillary to offer consolationt after she conceding to Donald Trump and she told him: ‘I’m sorry’.

The Democratic presidential candidate stepped into an anteroom for the conversation to apologize for losing to Trump in a conversation which has never previously been reported.

As she took the call Clinton knew she had ‘let her country down’ and that Obama’s legacy lay ‘shattered at Donald Trump’s feet’, a new book reveals.

Minutes earlier Clinton had called Trump and suppressed ‘the anger that touched every nerve in her body’ as she conceded.

She said: ‘Congratulations, Donald. ‘I’ll be supportive of the country’s success and that means your success as president.’

The drama of Clinton’s election in the Peninsula Hotel in Manhattan is detailed in Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Election Campaign.

Political journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes tell the hour by hour drama of how Clinton’s confidence at her victory was replaced by anxiety and resignation as Trump won the biggest upset in modern political history on November 9 last year.

The book says that as the results rolled in for states like Pennsylvania, the clear tipping point for the race for the White House, Obama called Clinton and said: ‘You need to concede’

According to the book, Obama was ‘determined to make sure that his friend understood that the election was over’ and that she had to accept the loss with dignity to counter Trump’s attempts to undermine the electoral system.

Obama said that he ‘didn’t see any point in prolonging the inevitable’ and didn’t want to turn the election into a ‘recount mess’ - then having delivered his message he hung up.

The call worked and Clinton’s close aide Huma Abedin called Trump’s campaign manager Kellyanne Conway.

The two candidates were brought to the line and Clinton conceded.

The authors write that Trump credited her for being a smart opponent who ran a tough campaign. The conversation lasted about a minute.

Next came a second, previously undisclosed call from Obama which ‘crystallized everything for Hillary’.

The book says: ‘Hillary winces. She wasn’t ready for this conversation. When she’d spoken with Obama just a little bit earlier the outcome of the election wasn’t final yet.

‘Now, though, with the President placing a consolation call, the reality and dimensions of her defeat hit her all at once.

‘She had let him down. She had let herself down. She had let her party down. And she had let her country down.

‘Obama’s legacy and her dreams of the Presidency lay shattered at Donald Trump’s feet. This was on her. Reluctantly she rose from her seat and took the phone.

‘Mr President’, she said softly. ‘I’m sorry’.

As she drafted her acceptance speech Clinton defied her aides who asked her to criticize Trump and said that she wanted a ‘gracious exit’.

Had Clinton won, her victory speech would have been a testament to her beloved mother Dorothy Rodham, the book reveals.

Beneath the glass ceiling of the Javits Center in Manhattan she would have imagined going up to her mother when she was eight years old and telling her: ‘As hard as it might be to imagine, your daughter will one day grow up and become President of the United States.

Shattered also offers a blunt assessment of why Clinton lost and says that some of her team thought that ‘Clinton Inc’, referring to the baggage and machinery of the Clinton family, was an ‘albatross’ around the campaign.

In early 2016 one of her advisers had given her a clear warning that Trump could beat her, a warning which seemed to go ignored.

At the time Clinton was beating Trump 46 points to 41 though neither candidate had secured their party’s nomination.

On election night as it became apparent his wife would lose Florida, Clinton had a ‘sinking feeling that the British vote to leave the European Union had been a harbinger for a kind of screw-it vote in the United States’

According to Shattered, the memo said: ‘FACT: Donald Trump can defeat Hillary Clinton and become the 45th President of the United States’.

The memo warned that Clinton ‘should not underestimate his capacity to draw people to the polls who normally do not vote’ because it could ‘tip the scales in key states’.

Clinton however did not seem to get it and once told her close aide Minyon Moore: ‘I don’t understand what’s happening with the country. I can’t get my arms around it’.

Bill too had sensed that his wife and her campaign team were not grasping the danger that Trump posed.

The authors contend that Bill felt that Brexit showed there was a ‘strong contempt for existing power structures that reflected the mood of the American electorate’.

The book says that Clinton felt his wife’s team were ‘underestimating the significance of Brexit’.

Clinton had come to power in 1992 by tapping into similar frustrations and he knew what it was like to be an insurgent candidate.

The book says: ‘Bill had a better feel for the working stiff, whether American or British, than anyone in Hillary’s orbit.

‘He knew that and he felt like he was being heard. But he couldn’t figure out why Hillary and her team weren’t executing’.

On election night as it became apparent his wife would lose Florida, Clinton had a ‘sinking feeling that the British vote to leave the European Union had been a harbinger for a kind of screw-it vote in the United States’.

He said: ‘It’s like Brexit. I guess it’s real’.

Hillary was 'so mad she couldn't think straight' after being humiliated in the Michigan Democratic primary.

Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign is available for pre-order on Amazon.