Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, last year signed a $7,000-a-month contract with the foundation of a major Clinton donor who made a fortune selling a type of mortgage that some critics say contributed to the housing collapse, hacked emails show.

In February of last year, as Podesta was working to lay the groundwork for Clinton’s soon-to-launch campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, he signed the contract with the Sandler Foundation, which was started by Herb Sandler and his late wife Marion Sandler.


The contract — a copy of which was included in emails illegally obtained from Podesta’s Gmail account and disseminated Monday by WikiLeaks — is still active, according to Herb Sandler, who said that it calls for Podesta to provide advice on grant-making and other foundation functions.

It’s unusual for the full-time chairman of a general-election presidential campaign to maintain an active side deal with a major donor to that campaign — let alone to raise money from that donor for the campaign.

But the hacked emails show that Podesta, who does not draw a salary from the Clinton campaign (though he has been paid $58,000 by the campaign for travel and “subsistence”), did both, while also maintaining a close personal relationship with Sandler.

The WikiLeaks cache shows that Podesta provided Sandler with philanthropic advice and assortments of cheeses and pastas as gifts on the holidays, while Sandler offered all manner of political observations and once tried to get Podesta to arrange for former President Bill Clinton to write a blurb for a book written by one of Sandler’s friends.

But Sandler brushed aside any concerns about potential conflicts of interest.

“I have never asked for anything of any political person — zero requests ever,” Sandler said. “If they’re responsive, it’s because they regard me as thoughtful, and a major contributor to Democratic causes,” Sandler said, adding that Podesta “knows that he doesn’t get bullshit from me. He knows I have no hidden agenda. He knows that my values are similar to his and that we care about people and not the billionaires, even though I ended up by some crazy thing to be one.”

Neither Podesta nor the Clinton campaign responded to questions about the contract.

The Clinton campaign instead issued a statement saying it’s “not commenting on the authenticity of any individual emails,” and accusing the Russian government of engineering the hack. Further, Clinton spokesman Glen Caplin urged the FBI “to clearly tell the American people” whether it’s investigating suggestions that associates of Clinton’s Republican rival, Donald Trump, had advance knowledge of the cyberattacks.

Sandler and his children this cycle also have donated nearly $4.4 million to Clinton’s presidential campaign, a supportive super PAC called Priorities USA Action and various Democratic Party committees, according to Federal Election Commission filings.

Herb Sandler’s Clinton-related giving picked up last December after a visit from Podesta.

Sandler is “ready to do the 2016 max early in the new year,” Podesta emailed the campaign’s finance team the day after visiting with Sandler in his hometown of San Francisco during a West Coast swing. “Whoever has been dealing with him should call him at the office on the Jan 4 to follow up,” Podesta wrote, adding that Sandler “is also prepared to double down on his Priorities support as well.”

The campaign’s finance director Dennis Cheng responded “Great!!,” calling Podesta “#ChairmanCash.”

The very next day, Sandler gave $1.5 million to Priorities USA Action, to which he has now given a total of $3 million, FEC records show.

While it’s illegal for super PACs and campaigns to coordinate their spending strategies, they are permitted to coordinate their fundraising within limits, and Podesta’s efforts with Sandler appear to be within those bounds.

The Sandler Foundation also is barred from supporting campaigns, and there is no evidence that it has done so with the Clinton campaign.

During the GOP primary, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s campaign chairman Mike Grebe drew scrutiny for his day job as head of a major foundation, despite working assiduously to separate his two roles. Nonetheless, the foundation funded conservative groups that were seen as laying the intellectual groundwork for Walker’s campaign.

The Sandlers’ big giving well predates Clinton’s current campaign.

The family’s fortune comes from the savings and loan institution that Herb and Marion Sandler ran for decades, a bank that became World Savings. It would end up making boatloads of cash from a type of adjustable rate mortgage that other lenders would later adopt, securitize and sell in a way that some have blamed for contributing to the housing bubble that burst in 2008. Not long before the burst and subsequent recession, the Sandlers sold the bank for $25.5 billion to Wachovia, earning $2.6 billion off the sale and donating most of their net worth to their foundation. Wachovia was later acquired by Wells Fargo.

The Sandlers met Podesta when they helped seed the Center for American Progress, the think tank he started in 2003 as a sort of Democratic administration in exile during George W. Bush’s presidency. Tax filings show that the Sandler Foundation has donated more than $37 million over the years to CAP, which worked to support President Barack Obama’s administration but has always been seen as more aligned with Hillary Clinton.

The WikiLeaks emails reveal that Podesta and his team at the Center for American Progress discussed how to push back on scrutiny of the Sandlers related to the 2008 housing collapse. That included an October 2008 "Saturday Night Live" sketch in which an actor playing Herb Sandler thanked members of Congress “for helping block congressional oversight of our corrupt activity.”

Podesta wrote to his colleagues that he’d talked to Herb Sandler, and “they are obviosly [sic] upset. Weird that snl should pick them out.”

After doing some research, a subordinate replied that “it appears default rates on their stuff was high (herb says not more so than others) and the losses were key to almsot [sic] wachovia failure -- athough [sic] herb emphasizes that they were only one of the institutions [sic] problems.”

Another staffer indicated plans to enlist then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the pushback. It’s unclear whether that happened or whether Podesta or CAP reached out to "SNL." But the editor in chief of the Sandler-funded journalism outfit ProPublica did, arguing that the Sandlers were unfairly vilified, according to a New York Times piece soon after the skit.

The show’s producer, Lorne Michaels, apologized for the skit.

Sandler told POLITICO that any suggestion that his bank’s products contributed to the collapse were “a bunch of bullshit,” pointing out that their bank used a risk-averse approach to their loans, which had among the lowest default rates in the industry.

But Scott Walter, president of Capital Research Center, a conservative nonprofit that monitors the giving of major liberal donors including Sandler, argued that Podesta’s newly revealed contractual relationship with Sandler stood in stark contrast to Clinton’s efforts to cast herself as tough on the financial industry.

“This is another instance where the Clinton campaign has been revealed to have surprising links to some of the most dubious parts of the finance industry,” Walter said.

The Sandlers’ philanthropy increasingly has focused on fighting financial inequality and the role of big money in politics — a subject about which Herb Sandler and Podesta emailed frequently, according to WikiLeaks.

In forwarding Podesta a 2014 study about rising inequality and the influence of money in politics with the headline “U.S. No Longer An Actual Democracy,” Sandler wrote: “This is precisely what Marion and I have believed for some time… It is horrible.”

The WikiLeaks emails reveal Sandler and Podesta working closely on the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, a research institution that was launched at CAP in 2013 and now operates independently.

One of the emails revealed that Sandler had agreed to donate $3 million a year for at least the first three years to the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, which focuses on policies to more evenly distribute the benefits of growth.

Sandler explained to POLITICO that during the process of working to launch the center, he realized “we had been picking his brain ad nauseum” for years without paying Podesta as a consultant — a scenario Sandler called “very unfair.” That led to the consulting contract, which Sandler cast as “a ripoff” for Podesta. “I’d pay a lot more for that advice,” Sandler said, calling Podesta “one the most intelligent, decent, thoughtful human beings I’d ever met.”

In March, as Clinton’s Democratic primary campaign against Bernie Sanders grew increasingly bitter, Sandler emailed Podesta just to check in.

“How are you?” Sandler wrote. “MIss you.”

Podesta responded: “I was going to call you last night but fell asleep … I'll call later.”

Bianca Padró Ocasio contributed to this report.