There are precisely two emails that even sound scandalous: one in which a scientist refers to borrowing another scientist's "trick"—which skeptics interpret as falsifying data and which actual legitimate scientists say means "a clever way of doing something"—to "hide the decline," which is a poor way of saying he is attempting to correct for the fact that tree rings don't reflect modern warming trends that are well-documented by actual thermometers.
The other email that is terribly scandalous is even better. As George Monbiot explains:
One of the most damaging emails was sent by the head of the climatic research unit, Phil Jones. He wrote "I can't see either of these papers being in the next [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"
One of these papers which was published in the journal Climate Research turned out to be so badly flawed that the scandal resulted in the resignation of the editor-in-chief.
So the scandal is that a researcher thought a paper was flawed and said he would do anything to keep it from being published, not because it said something dangerous that he is trying to keep hidden, but because he thought it was bad science. And then it turned out to be bad science.
And then again, there is always another side. Manipulating data (as the previous article reports) still looks quite bad and is indicative of shady science. Certainly an interesting debate right now.