A top aide calculatingly inserted a passage critical of the financial industry into one of Hillary Clinton’s many highly-paid speeches to big banks, “precisely for the purpose of having something we could show people if ever asked what she was saying behind closed doors for two years to all those fat cats,” he wrote in an email posted by Wikileaks.

In late November 2015, campaign speechwriter Dan Schwerin wrote an email to other top aides floating the idea of leaking that passage, which had come in a speech Clinton gave to Deutsche Bank in October 2014 in return for $260,000.

“I wrote her a long riff about economic fairness and how the financial industry has lost its way,” for that purpose, Schwerin wrote. “Perhaps at some point there will be value in sharing this with a reporter and getting a story written. Upside would be that when people say she’s too close to Wall Street and has taken too much money from bankers, we can point to evidence that she wasn’t afraid to speak truth to power.”

Another email, from among the thousands posted by Wikileaks over the past week from Hillary Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podesta’s Gmail account, shows how panicked members of the Clinton campaign intervened at the last minute to cancel a paid Bill Clinton speech to Morgan Stanley because it was timed too close to the launch of her campaign — against the initial wishes of the candidate herself.

In the passage that Schwerin wanted to leak from Clinton’s speech to Deutsche Bank, she quoted Chicago Mercantile Exchange president Terry Duffy warning that “some Wall Streeters can too easily slip into regarding their work as a kind of moneymaking game divorced from the concerns of Main Street.”

In his email to his fellow aides, however, Schwerin recognized that the press response might not be entirely in the campaign’s favor. “Downside would be that we could then be pushed to release transcripts from all her paid speeches, which would be less helpful (although probably not disastrous). In the end, I’m not sure this is worth doing, but wanted to flag it so you know it’s out there.”

Clinton Press Secretary Brian Fallon liked the idea, noting that a few outlets including the Associated Press and the New York Times were starting to write articles about Clinton’s Wall Street relationship. “I think we could come up with a vanilla characterization that challenges the idea that she sucked up to these folks in her appearances, but then use AP’s raising of this to our advantage to pitch someone to do an exclusive by providing at least the key excerpts from this Deutsche Bank speech,” he wrote back. “In doing so, we could have the reporting be sourced to a ‘transcript obtained by [news outlet]’ so it is not confirmed as us selectively providing one transcript while refusing to share others.”

Mandy Grunwald, a senior adviser to the campaign, worried that a strategic leak would backfire because the Deutsche Bank passages were not harsh enough and people would start looking for other speeches: “I am concerned that the passage below will exacerbate not improve the situation.”

The leak never happened, and the speech remained secret until one hacked Podesta email turned out to include an 80-page list of what the campaign viewed as potentially damaging excerpts from Clinton’s paid speeches.

The way Bill Clinton’s paid speech was cancelled is described in a separate email exchange. In early March, Robby Mook sent an email to Clinton aides with the subject line “WJC Speeches” noting that “Morgan Stanley is coming down” — an apparent reference to the cancellation of a Clinton speech at Morgan Stanley.

Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin asked if the campaign was involved in the cancellation. When Mook noted that Podesta had intervened, Abedin protested that Hillary Clinton disagreed with the cancellation and that she would lie to her about the reason.

“HRC very strongly did not want him to cancel that particular speech,” she wrote. “I think if John is getting involved in this scheduling matter, he must feel strongly. I will have to tell her that WJC chose to cancel it, not that we asked.”

Mook wrote back to Abedin seeking to justify the move: “Yes the issue is that if we’re announcing on the 12th/13th and he’s speaking to a wall street bank on the 15th, that’s begging for a bad rollout.”

Seven hours later, Abedin wrote back insisting again that Hillary Clinton did not want her husband to cancel the paid speech: “John and Robby — HRC is reiterating her original position. She does not want him to cancel.”

Mook then put his foot down, and launched into a long explanation of why Bill Clinton should not do the event — a notably political, not principled, objection.

“I know this is not the answer she wants, but I feel very strongly that doing the speech is a mistake — the data are very clear on the potential consequences. It will be three days after she’s announced and on her first day in Iowa, where caucus goes have a sharply more negative view of Wall Street than the rest of the electorate. Wall Street ranks first for Iowans among a list of institutions that ‘take advantage of every day Americans’, scoring twice as high as the general election electorate,” Mook wrote.

Seeking to cushion the blow, he noted that he understood the hardship it would put on the Clintons — who are multimillionaires.

“I recognize the sacrifice and dissapointment [sic] that cancelling will create, but it’s a very consequential unforced error and could plague us in stories for months. People would (rightfully) ask how we let it happen,” he wrote. “I would suggest that if she is determined to keep this speech that she talk with John becuase [sic] this is a very big deal in my view. Let me know if I can provide more information or otherwise be helpful.”

A day later, Abedin wrote back, noting that her boss had given in: “Robby — Just raised with her again. We are good to cancel esp if WJC is ok with it. Just needed a cool down period.”

The identity and motive of the hacker who gave these emails to Wikileaks is a subject of debate. U.S. intelligence agencies have declared — without providing any public evidence — that the Russian government was involved. And the Clinton campaign has similarly declared that the Russian government is doing this to support Donald Trump. All we know for sure, however, is that there have been no similar releases of hacked emails from the Trump campaign, and that thus far no evidence has emerged that would call into question the authenticity of any of the documents posted by Wikileaks.

Here is the full text of the “long riff” from the Deutsche Bank speech Schwerin said he wrote with future readers in mind: