As Trump Blasts Clinton, His Own Email Mess Emerges

Deep dive in 'Newsweek' reveals Trump, his companies purged documents in 'defiance of court orders'
By Jenn Gidman,  Newser Staff
Posted Oct 31, 2016 11:03 AM CDT
October Surprise: Trump Also Accused of Deleting Emails
Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, Colo., on Sunday.   (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley)

The commotion related to Hillary Clinton's emails has gone into overdrive just days before the election, and now Kurt Eichenwald is throwing some more email deletions into the mix for Newsweek—this time linked to Donald Trump. The article details Trump's own records purges, which included "systematically [destroying] or [hiding] thousands of emails, digital records, and paper documents ... often in defiance of court orders." Eichenwald's research points to deception on Trump's part going back to at least 1973, when Eichenwald says Trump, his father, and their real estate company used a "deny, impede, and delay" strategy—which included destroying court-requested documents—during a case in which they were accused of discriminating against African Americans in their rental units. Eichenwald notes Trump's "nonsensical" attempts to delay that case, including at least one affidavit that was proven to be a "lie."

But one fact Eichenwald dubs "shocking" emerged in a deposition by Trump himself: Not only did the Trumps not have a system to retain company records—they'd been actively destroying records for the past six months, via shredder and the trash can, to "save space." The case was closed in 1982 after a "slow death" due to lack of evidence and because the desegregation consent decree signed by Trump had expired, per the New York Times. Similar subterfuge took place in another court case that began in 2005, when a Trump company sued two Native American casinos. False documents were filed by Trump's camp, and his lawyers revealed "the company wiped clear the data from everyone's computers every year," leading the judge in the case to react with "near disbelief." Trump ended up eventually dropping the case. (Read Eichenwald's deep dive into Trump's "many decades of abusing the judicial system, ignoring judges, disregarding rules, destroying documents, and lying about it.")

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