The emails, obtained by hackers and being gradually released by WikiLeaks this month, also are revealing how efforts to minimize potential conflicts at the foundation led to power struggles and infighting among aides and Mrs. Clinton’s family.
One top aide to Mr. Clinton, Douglas J. Band, noted in an email that the former president had received personal income from some foundation donors and “gets many expensive gifts from them.”
Chelsea Clinton accused her father’s aides of taking “significant sums of money from my parents personally,” of “hustling” during foundation events to win clients for their own business, and of even installing spyware on her chief of staff’s computer.
Hillary Clinton, another email showed, had promised to attend a Clinton Foundation gathering in Morocco at the behest of its king, who had pledged $12 million to the charity. Her advisers worried that would look unseemly just as she was beginning her presidential campaign in earnest.
“She created this mess and she knows it,” a close aide, Huma Abedin, wrote of Mrs. Clinton in a January 2015 email.
For months, the Clintons have defended their foundation, making public proclamations that it went above and beyond what the law required in terms of transparency while Mrs. Clinton was at the State Department.
The emails, which came from the account of John D. Podesta, who had a leadership role at the foundation and is now Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, have not contained evidence to support Republican contentions that Mrs. Clinton performed any favors for foundation donors.
