Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton Hillary Rodham ClintonTracking poll: Clinton increases lead to 3 points Poll: Trump gains ground on Clinton Economy adds 161K jobs in final report before election MORE's campaign discussed dumping Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) months before she resigned as chairwoman, newly leaked emails show. 
 
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 Clinton aides were growing frustrated with the Florida Democrat's poor communication and inability to resolve "relatively simple matters" at the DNC, according to emails released Tuesday by WikiLeaks from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. 
 
 “Though we have reached a working arrangement with them, our dealings with Party leadership have been marked by challenges, often requiring multiple meetings and phone calls to resolve relatively simple matters,” Clinton staffer Heather Stone wrote in December of last year in a memo to the campaign. 
 
 “We are frequently caught in the middle of poor communication and a difficult relationship between the Chairwoman and the Executive Director.” 
 
 
 
 In the memo, Stone suggested three options: keeping Wasserman Schultz as chairwoman and working through the chief of staff; keeping Wasserman Schultz and reverting to having a "general election chair" work with her; or simply replace the Florida congresswoman after the Democratic National Convention in July. 
 
 “At the convention we would honor the Chairwoman’s leadership and service to the Party and introduce the new Chair for the final phase of the campaign,” Stone wrote. 

 In this photo taken Oct. 5, 2016, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's campaign manager John Podesta speaks to members of the media outside Clinton's home in Washington. As early as last... (Associated Press) 
 
 In this photo taken Oct. 5, 2016, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's campaign manager John Podesta speaks to members of the media outside Clinton's home in Washington. As early as last December, the Clinton campaign was planning to neutralize Democratic National Committee Chairwoman... (Associated Press) 
 
 WASHINGTON (AP) — As early as last December, the Clinton campaign was plotting ways to sideline the head of the Democratic Party amid complaints about internal fights in the party's leadership, according to the latest WikiLeaks release of hacked emails. 
 
 Among the options for Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz was neutralizing her and then forcing her out after the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in July. Other options forwarded by top campaign aide Heather Stone would have kept Wasserman Schultz in place but in a weakened capacity as a figurehead or a co-chairwoman who would cede power to a "general election chair" named by Clinton. 
 
 The memo urged "systemic shifts at the DNC leadership level" to help Clinton win a general election. The memo was part of the latest trove of emails stolen from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and released Tuesday. 
 
 "Though we have reached a working arrangement with them, our dealings with party leadership have been marked by challenges, often requiring multiple meetings and phone calls to resolve relatively simple matters," Stone's memo said. "We are frequently caught in the middle of poor communication and a difficult relationship between the chairwoman and the executive director." 
 
 Wasserman Schultz announced her resignation just before the DNC convention this past summer after an earlier WikiLeaks hack of DNC emails showed party officials had favored Clinton over challenger Bernie Sanders. The party apparatus was supposed to stay scrupulously neutral during the primary campaign. 
 
 Wasserman Schultz was replaced on an interim basis by Donna Brazile. 
 
 The Clinton campaign memo floated former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm as either the general election chair or as a replacement for Wasserman Schultz. 
 
 The latest email release also reveals that immediately after The New York Times broke the news that Hillary Clinton and her aides had used private accounts to conduct State Department business when she was secretary, chairman John Podesta told Cheryl Mills, an attorney and chief of staff to Clinton, that "we are going to have to dump all those emails" and that it was "better to do so sooner than later." 
 
 Podesta didn't say what he meant by "dump" — and the campaign hasn't responded to queries about the hacked email trove. 
 
 About a week later, Clinton addressed the issue, saying that about half the 60,000 emails were work-related and she had turned them over to the State Department. The rest were personal and withheld. She said most were sent to other officials in the department on their government accounts, so they were archived anyway. 
 
 Another hacked email reveals that as Clinton prepared to announce her candidacy last year, she wanted the Clinton Foundation to continue to accept contributions from foreign governments. An email from Clinton Foundation Senior Vice President Maura Pally to Mills on April 7, 2015, contains a memo that laid out proposed changes to the foundation if Clinton ran for president. It says Clinton would resign from the foundation board and not participate in any fundraising for it, which she did. 
 
 "Secretary Clinton's preference is for the foundation to continue to accept foreign government contributions, but to significantly increase disclosure. She does not want to limit the foundation's ability to operate programs now or in the future," the document states. 
 
 Another email chain contains a message from pollster and strategist Joel Benenson warning that if the foundation continues to take foreign contributions it could be a loser politically. 
 
 "We're going to be very vulnerable on that throughout and I think our opponents and some on our side will say at is unseemly for a potential U.S. president taking money from foreign governments for her private foundation," Benenson wrote. 
 
 The foundation announced in August that it would no longer accept money from foreign governments or corporations if Clinton is elected. 

 Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik) 
 
 One reason — perhaps the reason — that WikiLeaks's stolen Clinton campaign emails have been so damaging is that people in a running email conversation don't talk the way they do in public. A mention of whether to “use” Eric Garner in an ad — i.e., whether to mention him — is interpreted by Garner's daughter as proof Clinton wanted to “use” him — i.e., exploit his death. WikiLeaks itself, which has never pretended to be clued in to American domestic politics, has tweeted several stories that seemed nefarious to anyone who didn't know; for example, that “first draft” was the title of a newsletter and not a pre-publication column offered to Clinton for her approval. 
 
 The 41,841st hacked email might be our best example of the problem. On the evening of March 2, 2015, incoming Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta jumped into a thread about legal hiring to float a suggestion about what to do with the revelation that the future Democratic nominee had used a private server at the State Department. 
 
 “On another matter....and not to sound like Lanny, but we are going to have to dump all those emails so better to do so sooner than later,” Podesta wrote. 
 
 “Think you just got your new nick name :)" replied Cheryl Mills. 
 
 At 10:46 a.m. today, the finance news site ZeroHedge, which has gone to town on the hacked emails, spun this into a story of how Podesta might have revealed “intent” to obstruct any probe into the emails. 
 
 “If the exchange is shown to disclose intent to mislead,” writes Tyler Durden (the “Fight Club"-inspired byline for all ZeroHedge stories, “it will negate the entire narrative prepared by Clinton that she merely deleted 'personal' emails and will reveal a strategic plan to hinder the State Department and FBI 'investigation.'” 
 
 In short order, the Drudge Report linked to ZeroHedge's story, and it's circled around the Internet at the usual megaviral rate. When CNN anchor Jake Tapper tweeted the "dump" quote, with no endorsement whatsoever of ZeroHedge's read, the first comments on his tweet speculated on whether Podesta had just revealed criminal behavior. 
 
 But from context, it's clear that Podesta was talking about whether to make the emails public — not to delete them. His usage of “dump” resembled the typical D.C. usage of “Friday news dump,” a release of troves of documents that dares reporters to spend precious weekend hedonism time hunting through them. 
 
 ZeroHedge's own analysis actually builds the case for this. As the site notes, Podesta was emailing on the day that the New York Times released its blockbuster story on Clinton's use of a private email server and address while serving as secretary of state: 
 
 “It was only two months ago, in response to a new State Department effort to comply with federal record-keeping practices, that Mrs. Clinton’s advisers reviewed tens of thousands of pages of her personal emails and decided which ones to turn over to the State Department,” Michael S. Schmidt reported in the Times. “All told, 55,000 pages of emails were given to the department. Mrs. Clinton stepped down from the secretary’s post in early 2013.” 
 
 On that day, Podesta was reacting to the news that 55,000 pages were turned over. According to the FBI, 31,830 emails that Clinton had deemed to be personal were deleted “sometime between March 25-31, 2015.” If every problem looks like a smoking hole, you're going to see smoking guns everywhere, including here. 
 
 But read Podesta again. He did not want to “sound like Lanny,” yet he was suggesting that the emails needed to be “dumped.” While ZeroHedge considers this an open question, context suggests that Podesta was referring to Lanny Davis, a freelance Clinton defender whom Clintonworld had barely-concealed contempt for. A self-styled crisis management specialist, Davis's first advice for anyone ensnared by scandal is to “get the facts out.” 
 
 That was his advice in this scandal, too. On TV, Davis quickly advised that the Clinton campaign turn over everything it had. On March 8, Davis went further and told Fox News that Clinton should hand over the server. 
 
 “We gotta zap Lanny out of our universe,” incoming Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook wrote to Podesta. “Can't believe he committed her to a private review of her hard drive on TV.” 
 
 Clinton's campaign has opted to answer no questions about the substance of WikiLeaks emails, but people familiar with the March 2 exchange say that Podesta was debating whether the campaign should release everything or grit its teeth. At the time he wrote the email, the Select Committee on Benghazi had not yet issued a subpoena for Clinton's email; that would come two days later. There was no FBI investigation into the server; that would not be recommended for months. 
 
 In the meantime, Clinton herself — or, more accurately, the village of staffers who man her Twitter account — basically called for a document dump. 
 
 I want the public to see my email. I asked State to release them. They said they will review them for release as soon as possible. — Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) March 5, 2015 
 
 Podesta, having lived through umpteen fishing expeditions through subpoena'd documents, was asking whether the email trove revealed by the Times could be released, and it turned out that classification issues — ones that continue to dog Clinton — prevented that. 
 
 For the alternate theory to work, the theory that Podesta advocated a mass email deletion, you have to overlook all of this and more. First: Podesta knew that 55,000 pages of emails had been turned over months earlier. Second: Podesta made no distinction between those emails and the personal ones that Clinton had already thought she'd deleted. (Not to slog through the weeds, but Clinton had asked for personal emails to be deleted every 60 days, and the FBI found that a staffer only got around to deleting those emails on her server in late March 2015.) Third: How many “Lannys” does Clintonworld have strong opinions about? 
 
 Tuesday was hyped as a (nother) day that WikiLeaks would release information that could put Clinton in jail. This email definitely has grist for a headline that could hurt Clinton. Read beyond the headline, though, and you've got another case of a shorthand conversation being blown up into a phony scandal.
– Democratic Party head Debbie Wasserman Schultz stepped down just before the convention in July. But emails released by WikiLeaks Tuesday reveal the Clinton campaign was plotting how to get rid of her months earlier, the AP reports. A memo from a campaign aide and included in campaign chair John Podesta's hacked emails reads: "Our dealings with party leadership have been marked by challenges, often requiring multiple meetings and phone calls to resolve relatively simple matters." The campaign thought about forcing Wasserman Schultz out at the convention or taking away her powers and leaving her as a figurehead or co-chair. It turns out they didn't have to do either, as Wasserman Schutlz resigned on her own after other leaked emails showed the party secretly backing Clinton over Sanders when it was supposed to remain neutral, according to the Hill. Meanwhile, other emails leaked Tuesday feature Podesta saying the campaign is "going to have to dump all those emails" after the New York Times broke the story about Clinton and aides using private accounts. And while many are using this as evidence the campaign wanted to hide evidence, the Washington Post reports context within the email exchange makes it clear that wasn't the case. Rather, it appears Podesta was advocating for making the emails public, using a phrasing similar to "the typical DC usage of 'Friday news dump.'" In fact, the email exchange references a crisis management specialist who advises people in scandals to "get the facts out" and had advised the Clinton campaign to do just that.