Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman wanted to push the White House to invoke executive privilege in order to withhold emails between President Obama and the former secretary of state from Congress while a committee investigated Benghazi.

The emails were hacked from Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta’s Gmail account and posted Friday by WikiLeaks.

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In an email dated March 4, 2015, Podesta asks Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s longtime legal counsel, if President Obama could invoke executive privilege, the longtime practice of exempting correspondence from the president from transparency disclosures. The emails were sent to and from Clinton’s private server in what turned out later to be a violation of federal regulations.

“Think we should hold emails to and from [Obama]?”

“Think we should hold emails to and from [Obama]?” wrote Podesta. “That’s the heart of his exec privilege. We could get them to ask for that. They may not care, but I [sic] seems like they will.”

The email to Mills came only two days after The New York Times exposed the private server Clinton had been using at the State Department from 2009 to 2013, when she was secretary of state.

“Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, State Department officials said, and may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record,” The Times wrote on March 3, 2015.

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That revelation brought an immediate request from Congress for Clinton to preserve all Benghazi-related emails. Four U.S. citizens were killed in Benghazi, Libya, at diplomatic compounds on Sept. 11, 2012. Clinton’s alleged mishandling of the tragedy has dogged her ever since.

But the U.S. House Select Committee on Benghazi didn’t know about the private server until March 2, 2015.

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On March 7, President Obama told CBS News that he didn’t know about the private server and email until it broke in The Times on March 2.

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But in fact, there were emails from the White House to Clinton’s email address. Obama used an email pseudonym to message Clinton directly.

On March 9, 2015, a White House spokesman had to clean up Obama’s remarks. The spokesman said Obama knew about the private email address but did not know about the private server, which was handling classified information.

As for Podesta’s plot, it looks like it paid off. On Jan. 29, 2016, a State Department spokesman said the president had indeed sent 18 messages to Clinton’s private email address, but the emails would not be turned over. The spokesman denied the messages contained classified or sensitive information.

On July 5, Obama’s FBI Director James Comey listed the numerous violations Clinton committed by using a private server, but said they did not rise to the level of charging her.