WASHINGTON — Hillary Clinton and a senior aide discussed sending a secure cell phone to the secretary of state by FedEx or a personal courier, according to e-mails released Thursday. The State Department said either approach would have been acceptable, if the telephone was rendered inoperable for the journey.

The unusual exchange from 2010 begins with Clinton confidante Huma Abedin telling her boss that she would mail the secure phone from Washington before her husband, then-Rep. Anthony Weiner, takes her to the airport. Clinton asks if one of Weiner’s assistants could make the delivery.

“OK I will (redacted) just fedex secure cell phone from dc. Anthony leaving office to bring me to airport now so hopefully will make it just in time,” Abedin writes in the afternoon of Aug. 2, 2010.

“Maybe one of Anthony’s trusted staff could deliver secure phone?” Clinton responds four hours later.

The e-mails show the degree of trust Clinton had for Weiner before he was hit by scandal. Abedin is perhaps Clinton’s closest aide.

Abedin recently separated from Weiner after the latest in a series of sexually explicit text messages surfaced from the one-time rising star of the Democratic Party.

Clinton and Abedin wrote to each other using private e-mail addresses outside the State Department’s system, a practice that has roiled the Democratic nominee’s campaign for the presidency. Clinton has apologized for using a private e-mail account connected to a server in the basement of her New York home. The FBI announced last week it was examining e-mails found on a computer seized from Weiner during its unrelated investigation of his sexually explicit texts to a 15-year-old girl in North Carolina.

The exchange over the secure phone was among 1,280 pages of e-mails that the department released Thursday. The department received the documents from the FBI and received a court order to release them under the Freedom of Information Act.