Donald Trump, who has frequently attacked Democrat Hillary Clinton for the ongoing probe into her use of email, had his own email issues a decade ago, according to a new report from USA Today.
When Florida Judge Jeffrey Streitfeld ordered Trump in 2006 to turn over years’ worth of emails in a civil lawsuit involving his casino business, the Trump Organization responded it had retained no email records from 1996 to 2001 and said Trump Tower executives used their personal email accounts.
“He has a house in Palm Beach County listed for $125 million, but he doesn’t keep emails. That’s a tough one,” Streitfeld said, according to court transcripts obtained by USA Today. “If somebody starts to put forth as a fact something that doesn’t make any sense to me and causes me to have a concern about their credibility in the discovery process, that’s not a good direction to go, and I am really having a hard time with this.”
The emails were a central point in the lawsuit against an ex-employee filed in 2004 by Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts. The former employee, Richard Fields, alleged Trump wasn’t receptive when he floated the idea of developing a casino with Florida’s Seminole Tribe. But when Fields left the company and pursued the venture with other business partners, Trump hit Fields with a lawsuit claiming he was entitled to the more than $1 billion in profits accumulated over a decade.
Attorneys argued that if Trump has been pursuing a similar venture with the tribe there would be a paper trail of emails documenting those discussions, according to the report.
But after the judge ordered Trump to hand over the emails, his lawyer responded that there were “no emails” because the company didn’t keep emails and Trump himself didn’t use email.
General counsel for the casino testified that every year “everything was just wiped out and deleted from pretty much everybody’s computers.”
The case settled before the court could rule on whether Trump destroyed evidence.
Read the full report via USA Today.
