The White House coordinated with Hillary Clinton early in her presidential campaign concerning the looming public-relations disaster that would inevitably follow the disclosure of her private email server, a report said Thursday.

The damage control, which included close contact with the State Department in early 2015, was revealed in emails obtained by the Republican National Committee as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, according to the Wall Street Journal.

One of the exchanges included a request by the White House communications director to the State Department asking if current Secretary of State John Kerry could dodge questions from the media that concerned the Clinton email scandal.

The emails also showed a top official at the State Department disputing reports that a department official told Congress that Clinton made a mistake in using the private account as secretary of state.

The RNC obtained the documents under the lawsuit and made available to the Journal some that concerned correspondence with the White House.

It was not clear what other materials had been disclosed in the suit.

Meredith McGehee of Issue One, a nonpartisan group that advocates for campaign finance reform, told the Journal that there were probably no legal concerns about the email exchange because “federal law permits members of the White House staff to engage in some political activity.”

The decision to use a personal email server has been a stain on Clinton’s presidential campaign. And the newly disclosed exchanges highlight the extent to which the Clinton campaign went to bury the issue before it became a political firestorm.

The Democratic presidential nominee has maintained she treated classified information properly, but the State Department has since retroactively classified some 2,093 of the 30,300 work emails from her server prior to their court-issued public release.

Clinton has apologized for the email arrangement. Her campaign has called the retroactive classification a symptom of an overclassification process “run amok.”

In July, FBI Director James Comey recommended against charging Clinton, though he did describe her behavior with classified material as “extremely careless.”