The chuckling we hear in the sky comes from God, who has punished Hillary Clinton for her hatred of transparency with the brightest sunlight any presidential campaign has ever had to endure. (Just imagine the punishment in store for Donald Trump.) Thanks to WikiLeaks and other document dumps, we’ve been able to view the decisions and deliberations of Clinton’s associates in something approaching real time. And we’re far from done. Now that F.B.I. agents have stumbled on a new cache of Clinton-related e-mails, the investigation of Hillary and her e-mail handling has been resuscitated. Like or hate her, we’re going to know a lot more about her than we want to. View more There’s a lot of material to view. For those trying to get a sense of the Clinton universe, though, The Podesta E-mails, from WikiLeaks, may be the finest source. John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman (not to be confused with Robby Mook, Clinton’s campaign manager), had the misfortune of getting his e-mail hacked and passed on to WikiLeaks, which has been releasing troves of his correspondence at regular intervals for the past few weeks. It’s safe to say that everyone in Washington has been going through them, half hoping and half dreading to see themselves mentioned, but perhaps you’ve had the good sense to resist. We can talk about whether it’s fair to the players (no, it’s not) or whether it’s moral for us to pore through these documents (it’s complicated) or whether Vladimir Putin made all of it happen (doubtful). But for now the big question is just this: what, if you waste your time on The Podesta E-mails, is the long-term effect? VIDEO: The Evolution of Hillary Rodham Clinton

The first thing you’re likely to feel is weariness. It’s related to a decent rule of politics that people who get restored to office are worse the second time around. Winston Churchill: great wartime prime minister, mediocre peacetime one. Juan Peron: successful 1950s dictator, lousy 1970s dictator. Et cetera. So there’s a dispiriting familiarity to the cast of characters surrounding Hillary Clinton, either as employees or surrogates. Names like Podesta (chief of staff to Bill Clinton back in the 90s), Lanny Davis, Mandy Grunwald, David Brock—weren’t we done with these people 20 years ago? Not to mention Bill and Hillary and Chelsea themselves. Then you probably start to think that Podesta himself looks pretty sane. There’s dirt and smoke swirling all around him, but he’s not the cause of it. A disciplined and cautious type, Podesta says nothing wild. Every day sees a flood of communications, and most of Podesta’s missives are super-short—e.g. “Sure,” “agree,” or “Let’s discuss tomorrow.” He deals quietly and diplomatically with feuding parties, rarely making himself the focus of anything. Even his incautious pronouncements are directed at safe targets, like Sidney Blumenthal (“Sid is lost in his own web of conspiracies”), or Brock (“Welcome to whacko land”), or volatile Clinton aide Philippe Reines (“you’re torn between patting him on the back and trying to get him committed to Bellevue”). There are interesting leads and hints of things (like what does “handcuffed by the Ira problem” mean in this one?), but so far you’ll find nothing close to a scandal in itself. No one is talking about hiding bodies, money, or lovers. Mostly, there’s mundane and unsurprising discussion of tactics, dates, donors, fund-raisers, speeches, press inquiries, media appearances, employees, volunteers, and all the other ingredients of a presidential campaign. Hillary Clinton is a cautious candidate, and Clinton-land is rife with dreary careerists, as competent campaigns should be. God forbid having to spend an evening with them, of course. (Give me Diamond and Silk.) But you don’t want your campaign to be too interesting. Procedurally, Clinton’s campaign is, mostly, reassuringly plodding and rules-bound. You might find yourself just looking for every e-mail sent by Neera Tanden, a Hillary Clinton policy advisor in the past and successor to Podesta as head of the Center for American Progress. That’s because Tanden stands out for being unguarded, gossipy, and disarmingly human. When she learned about Clinton’s private e-mail server, Tanden speculated that Clinton loyalist Cheryl Mills, who was chief of staff to Hillary in the State Department, was to blame. “This is a cheryl special,” Tanden wrote. “Know you love her, but this stuff is like her Achilles heal. Or kryptonite. She just can’t say no to this shit.” You might also track Doug Band, erstwhile Bill Clinton body man who parlayed his Clinton years into a consulting empire. Band says whatever the hell he wants, making references to all sorts of potential conflicts of interest in defense of his own. In 2011, when Chelsea Clinton was trying to police Band’s cross-pollination between his business and the Clinton Foundation (and there was lots of intrigue), Band complained, “She is acting like a spoiled brat kid who has nothing else to do but create issues to justify what she’s doing.” No one seems to like Chelsea, but her e-mails make people jump to attention. Then, after some of the dust has settled, she writes to Band that someone has had “terrific things to say about him,” of which Band writes to Podesta and Cheryl Mills that the “apple doesn’t fall far”: “A kiss on the cheek while she is sticking a knife in the back, and front.”

Mills, for her part, emerges in the e-mails as a prime exhibit of Clintonia. When she was supposed to be helping the secretary of state in the task of U.S. diplomacy, Mills spent an awful lot of time on matters related to sustaining the Clinton empire, even traveling up to New York to meet with candidates for job openings at the Clinton Foundation. When the dispute between Chelsea Clinton and Doug Band came to a head, it was Mills who was at the center of things, preparing memos, calling Chelsea, corresponding with Podesta, and trying to make sure all the Clintons were appeased. You can argue that Mills was just volunteering her time on the side, just as one might for the American Lung Association, but the charity she chose happened to share the name of her boss. When it comes to Clinton dealings, bridges, not walls—right? Wealth is also central to the world of The Podesta E-mails. Tanden refers to Clinton donor Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild—who became famous in 2008 for jumping to John McCain after Hillary Clinton lost the primaries—as “that crazy Lade De Rothschild person,” but Lady de Rothschild shows up again and again. Now she’s at Hillary’s speech to a bank. Now she’s getting Hillary to participate in a conference on “inclusive capitalism” in London. Now she’s throwing a book party for Brock, which Podesta will, despite “whacko” qualms, attend. Now she’s offering advice about Elizabeth Warren, writing to Mills that “we need to craft the economic message for Hillary so that Warren’s common inaccurate conclusions are addressed.” Mills forwards this precious advice to six top campaign officials, including Podesta, the campaign chairman and, Mook, the campaign manager. Guest lists include her, just as they include numerous hedge fund managers and financiers. Yes, Democrats look a lot like the party of the 1 percent. I don’t mean to single out Lady de Rothschild, who can’t help that her name sounds like a Disney character. There’s also mogul Haim Saban. “She needs to differentiate herself from Obama on Israel,” he writes. There’s Eric Schmidt, the former C.E.O. of Google, who is meeting with Bill Clinton and, according to someone at the foundation, “donating the Google plane for the Africa trip.” There’s Herb Sandler, who is paying Podesta $7,000 a month to be an advisor, weighing in on income inequality and mortgages and much else. You’d like to see them saying something outrageous. But these millionaires (and billionaires) all live in the realm of respectable opinion—sending around and sharing the same articles from The New Yorker and New York Review of Books. You might feel sorry for some of the people being discussed, despite their power and influence. Who is kind enough to tell Anne-Marie Slaughter, former State Department colleague and now head of the New America Foundation, that she’s driving everyone up the wall with her too-frequent e-mails? No one—Mills and Podesta joke about it among themselves. Podesta writes, “Can we switch HRC’s e-mail and not tell Anne-Marie?” You might even feel sorry for former Joe Biden staffer Ron Klain, who’s trying to ditch Biden (and discourage any presidential run) in order to jump on the Hillary train, and the result is that he disgusts everyone. “I have to say, his problem is always whether he can be loyal,” Podesta writes, “I feel like a chump for vouching for him.” Or you might not feel that sorry for him, really.