The Clinton campaign debated whether to come out against the Keystone XL pipeline in August 2015 as a way to turn attention away from her secret email server and the bad press she was generating, according to messages hacked from her campaign chairman’s account and released Monday by WikiLeaks.

The move seemed to surprise Mrs. Clinton’s longtime personal aide Cheryl Mills, who questioned the move in an email chain debating strategy.

Dan Schwerin, Mrs. Clinton’s speechwriter, fired back that they had been seeking a moment to break with the controversial pipeline and announce Mrs. Clinton’s opposition — but they needed to do it in a sneaky way, for political reasons.

“We are trying to find a good way to leak her opposition to the pipeline without her having to actually say it and give up her principled stand about not second-guessing the President in public,” Mr. Schwerin said in his message to Ms. Mills and other top campaign officials.

The campaign would end up waiting more than a month before actually having Mrs. Clinton announce her opposition to the pipeline in late September.

The campaign’s willingness to use Keystone to shift attention from Mrs. Clinton’s troubles over her secret email server is a signal of just how troublesome those emails were. In the August exchange the campaign debated how to phrase an apology, with Mrs. Clinton’s personal lawyer, David Kendall, weighing in at one point with suggestions.

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