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Lawsuit accused Trump company of deleting emails

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A past lawsuit involving Donald Trump accused the billionaire’s Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts of routinely destroying email evidence, according to a new report.

The charge from defendants in a suit initially brought by Trump was never resolved, according to USA Today.

{mosads}USA Today on Monday reported that Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts, a publicly traded casino company, filed a suit in 2004 against Richard Fields, a former employee.

The suit said Fields reportedly pitched the idea of building a casino with the Seminole Native American tribe in Florida during the 1990s.

But Fields later allegedly told Trump the idea was unfeasible, it added, only to leave the businessman’s employ and implement the plan elsewhere.

USA Today said the companies sued by Trump argued the billionaire’s claims, if true, could be verified by his company’s emails and other records documenting their talks.

Robert Borello, the Trump company’s lawyer, then said during a March 2006 hearing that Trump hotels did not retain email records.

“My understanding from speaking to my client is that there are no emails,” he said, according to a transcript obtained by USA Today.

“They don’t keep emails from the time period from ’96 until within the last couple of years, when the organization instituted retention procedures for keeping emails electronically.”

USA Today said the Trump Organization claimed its executives routinely deleted emails between 1996 and 2001, adding it did not keep backup records.

A Trump IT director also said the company relied on personal email accounts using dial-up Internet services until 2001 despite Trump’s launch of a high-speed Internet provider three years earlier.

Judge Jeffrey Streitfeld reportedly voiced surprise over the arrangement during the hearing in Broward County, Fla.

“He has a house up in Palm Beach County listed for $125 million, but he doesn’t keep emails,” he said according to a transcript. “That’s a tough one.

“If somebody starts to put forth as fact something that doesn’t make 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 companies Trump sued charged in a May 2007 motion that Trump Hotels “has been regularly destroying data and evidence located on its computer, both before and after this case was filed.”

USA Today said Trump’s company settled the case with defendants before the judge ruled on whether Trump Hotels had destroyed evidence.

Trump, now the GOP’s de facto presidential nominee, has repeatedly slammed Hillary Clinton’s use of a provide email server during her tenure as secretary of State.

Trump late last week, for example, asked the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee where “33,000 emails that [she] deleted” had gone.

Tags Business Donald Trump Emails Hillary Clinton Lawsuits Politics

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