Newly released interview notes from special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation show President Trump's campaign tried to obtain and leverage information damaging to his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.

The chaotic effort can be traced to Trump himself, who tasked subordinates with tracking down two sets of emails, according to a 274-page batch of mostly redacted investigative interview notes released by the Justice Department via a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by Buzzfeed.

Trump gave the command to “get the emails," referring to 33,000 emails that Clinton deleted or otherwise did not provide investigators looking into her private server from her time as secretary of state and the thousands of emails stolen from Democrats that later ended up on WikiLeaks, while on his campaign plane, his deputy campaign manager Rick Gates told Mueller’s team.

Gates, a former business partner of Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy and making false statements, told investigators that then-Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Mike Flynn “said he could use his intelligence resources to obtain the emails” and noted that “Flynn was adamant that the Russians did not carry out the hack.”

The records released Saturday feature notes on interviews with Gates, Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, and Trump campaign chief executive Steve Bannon that show the Trump campaign working with the Republican National Committee to take advantage of the WikiLeaks release of hacked Democratic emails. They also shed light on conspiracy theories peddled within the campaign, Manafort’s shady Ukraine dealings coming back to bite the campaign, the Trump Tower meeting, and the Trump campaign’s deception about the timing of business negotiations over Trump Tower Moscow.

Gates told Mueller’s team that “Donald Trump Jr. would ask where the emails were in family meetings,” and Flynn, Manafort, Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, Trump campaign co-chairman Sam Clovis, and future Attorney General Jeff Sessions “expressed interest in obtaining the emails as well.”

“The priority focuses of the Trump campaign opposition research team were Clinton’s emails and contributions to the Clinton Foundation,” Gates said.

The documents reveal discussions of several since-debunked conspiracy theories among Trump's campaign staff. Gates, who cooperated with Mueller's team, said there was “an inside job theory about how the emails were obtained fueled by the death of Seth Rich,” and he “recalled Manafort saying the hack was likely carried out by the Ukrainians, not the Russians."

U.S. intelligence agencies later concluded these emails were stolen by operatives working for Russian military intelligence.

Trump and Kushner were skeptical about cooperating with the RNC before they realized it could help them leverage the Wikileaks revelations, Gates told Mueller's investigators.

“The RNC also indicated they knew the timing of upcoming releases,” Gates told investigators, but “did not specify who knew.”

Manafort was happy because the WikiLeaks emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee in 2016 “offered a mode of deflection for the campaign after a sink in polling numbers following Trump’s comments about Ted Cruz’s father at the Republican National Convention,” Gates said. He admitted that not long after the emails were stolen, there were public indications that Russia was behind the WikiLeaks emails.

Trump was “generally frustrated Clinton’s missing emails had not been found,” Gates also noted.

Bannon, who worked in the Trump White House as a chief strategist until August 2017, told investigators his interest lay more with the 33,000 missing Clinton emails. Investigators noted that “Trump was focused on ‘crooked Hillary’ and the Uranium One story, and thought the 33,0000 missing emails might unlock it,” but Bannon said he and Trump “never discussed that the Russians might have them.” Bannon also told the FBI that he would “generally blow off” Trump campaign associate George Papadopoulos’ efforts to set up meetings between Trump and foreign leaders and that he “never heard Papadopoulos tell anyone else in the campaign … that the Russians had dirt on Clinton.”

Also in the newly released documents, Cohen, who is serving a prison sentence for crimes including lying to Congress, discussed the Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 between Trump campaign members and Russians.

“Trump Junior said to Trump that he was setting up a meeting in order to get dirt on Hillary Clinton,” Cohen told Mueller’s team.