One of Hillary Clinton’s close advisers called her secret email server “f-ing insane,” according to new emails leaked Thursday by WikiLeaks.

Neera Tanden, head of the Center for American Progress and a fierce Clinton defender, fired off the message in July 2015 to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, proposing a painful death to whoever approved the bizarre email arrangement Mrs. Clinton maintained at the State Department.

“Like whole thing is f–ing insane,” she wrote to Mr. Podesta.

She wondered whether the person who approved the arrangement has “been drawn and quartered.”

Mrs. Clinton had initially insisted she had approval to operate her secret server, which she kept at her home in New York.

But in a sworn deposition earlier this month she admitted that she didn’t get permission from anyone.

The State Department has said the arrangement violated policy, and FBI Director James Comey said it threatened national security. He declined to recommend criminal charges against her, however, saying she was too technologically inept to understand the material she was handling or the risks she was running.

The latest email from Ms. Tanden comes on the heels of a WikiLeaks document dump featuring Mrs. Clinton’s former chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, telling Mr. Podesta in 2015 to “clean this up,” a reference to emails President Obama received from Mrs. Clinton’s personal email address.

Mrs. Clinton’s team seemed stunned that Mr. Obama claimed not to know of his top diplomat’s secret email.

Another March 2015 email included Ms. Tanden saying the former secretary of state’s decisions regarding the email server scandal were rooted in a desire to “get away with it.”

Editor’s note: The original version of this story stated Mr. Podesta sent the email in question instead of receiving it from adviser Mrs. Tanden.

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