WASHINGTON – Hillary Clinton has championed equal pay for women, which is why red flags went up at her campaign when the issue was getting attention last year.

Campaign researchers warned there were “huge discrepancies” between the pay of men and women at the Clinton Foundation and Team Clinton should be prepared for scrutiny, according to hacked emails released by Wikileaks.

A campaign aide emailed her findings about the staggering pay gaps at the family foundation.

“3 out of the 11 highest paid employees of the Foundation are women,” Karuna Seshasai wrote Feb. 24, 2015 in her three research takeaways.

“Avg salary of the highest paid men is $294,157.50, while the avg salary of the highest paid women is $181,576.66 ($112K difference).”

“Median salary of the highest paid men is $346,106, while the median salary of the highest paid women is $185,386 ($190K difference.)”

The researchers looked into the Clinton’s Foundation’s 2013 payroll because reports were surfacing Clinton underpaid her female employees.

“Guys – Given the story yesterday about pay equity at the State Department, I wanted to flag something that came out of our research on pay equity at the Foundation,” Ian Mandel, a Democratic researcher emailed Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook and research director Tony Carrk. “There are huge discrepancies, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they went here next.”

Mook forwarded the results to top Clinton aide Cheryl Mills, who revealed she “flagged” the issue for the researchers.

“This was where they needed to look next,” Mills said.

One day earlier, the Washington Free Beacon published a story that Clinton paid women working for her in the Senate 72 cents for each dollar she paid men.

Team Clinton rejected the methodology of the report because it excluded full-time workers who look unpaid leaves of absence to work on campaigns. Using their methodology, Clinton’s camp maintained the median salary for men and women to be identical in her office at $40,000.

Clinton routinely calls for equal pay for men and women and called for passage of the Paycheck Fairness Act to fight workplace “discrimination.”

The Clinton Foundation rejected the Clinton campaign’s research conclusions.

“The charge that the Clinton Foundation doesn’t pay women equal to men has been debunked by PolitiFact,” the foundation said in a statement.

The foundation pointed to a May 2016 article by PolitiFact that found allegations of Clinton Foundation wage disparity are “half-true” because “the statistical pool is too limited and the methodology is too crude to demonstrate evidence of hypocrisy.”

The Foundation offered stats that its senior leadership team is split evenly between men and women and the median salary of women in leadership was “91 percent” of the median salary for men.