Strikingly, given that she has set off an uproar over her emails, Mrs. Clinton is not a verbose correspondent. At times, she sends her highly regarded foreign policy adviser, Jake Sullivan, an email containing a news article, with a simple instruction: Please print. (Mrs. Clinton, though she has taken to Twitter and embraced other forms of modern technology, appears to like to read articles on paper.)

There were also the more mundane messages that crowd many government workers’ inboxes: scheduling, logistics, even a news alert about a breaking story from Politico, forwarded to the secretary by a senior aide.

The emails showed Mrs. Clinton and her inner circle reacting as the administration’s view of what happened in Benghazi changed, and the messages shed some light on a pivotal moment in the attack’s aftermath involving Susan E. Rice, then the ambassador to the United Nations.

On Sept. 16, five days after the attack, Ms. Rice appeared on several Sunday news programs, including ABC’s “This Week,” to offer the administration’s view on the attack. Some conservatives suggested that Ms. Rice took on the role of public spokeswoman in those first few days after the attacks so that Mrs. Clinton could duck the controversy. (Ms. Rice has said that Mrs. Clinton declined to appear because she was tired after a grueling week.)

The emails do not settle that question, the senior officials said. But they do suggest that Mrs. Clinton and her aides were ultimately relieved that she had not gone as far as Ms. Rice had in her description of the attacks.

The day that Ms. Rice appeared on the shows, Mr. Sullivan, who served as Mrs. Clinton’s deputy chief of staff and is one of her most trusted advisers, emailed Mrs. Clinton a transcript of Ms. Rice’s remarks on ABC’s “This Week.” Mr. Sullivan’s message was brief, but he appeared pleased by how it had gone. Ms. Rice, on the show, described it as a spontaneous eruption of violence, triggered by an offensive anti-Muslim video.

“She did make clear our view that this started spontaneously then evolved,” Mr. Sullivan wrote to Mrs. Clinton.