Donald Trump likes to bring up Hillary Clinton's email debacle during her time as secretary of state, but he has skeletons in his own digital closet — 10 years ago, the Trump Organization was accused of destroying email evidence as part of a lawsuit.
In 2004, USA Today reports, Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts filed a lawsuit against a former employee named Richard Fields, claiming that Fields tried to develop a relationship with the Seminole Tribe in Florida to build a casino, but told Trump it couldn't happen. He then left the company in the late 1990s and made a deal with the tribe with different partners. Trump sued the companies involved, arguing he should be entitled to the $1 billion in profits expected from these casinos over the next 10 years. The entities Trump sued fired back, saying if he really had been close to sealing a similar deal, he would have emails and other records proving it. The judge agreed, and asked Trump Hotels to provide everything from emails to meeting calendars to financial documents.
That's when Trump's lawyer told the judge his client didn't use email, his company didn't keep emails, and there were no records available from 1996 to 2001, USA Today reports. Another employee testified that when new computers were ordered, the old ones were destroyed without saving any documents. "Every year everything was just wiped out and deleted from pretty much everybody's computers," said Bob Pickus, general counsel of the casino unit at the time, according to court documents. (The Trump campaign and his lawyers did not respond to USA Today's requests for comment.)
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The defendants in the case argued that email evidence had been purposely destroyed, and Judge Jeffrey Streitfeld, now retired, remembers being stunned. "I was a bit incredulous that an organization of that significance doesn't do email," he told USA Today. "I had heard a number of things in 24 years on the bench, but that stuck in my mind." Before the judge could rule on whether evidence was destroyed, the case was settled. Read more about the case and the antiquated technology used at Trump Tower at USA Today.
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