Donald Trump Has His Own E-mail Scandal

In 2006, a judge ordered Donald Trump's casino operation to turn over a series of e-mails, and allegedly found that Trump Organization had routinely erased e-mails dating between 1996 and 2001, according to USA Today. Furthermore, this charge was actually never resolved, so it is still out there waiting for resolution. Defendants in this case that Trump brought said this amounted to destruction of evidence. This is particularly curious given one of Trump's favorite talking points used to disparage Hillary Clinton is simply mentioning her infamous e-mail scandal, which has seen heavy criticism over the past year.

In Trump's own words, "She's as crooked as they come, she had a little bad news today as you know from some reports came down weren't so good." So — and play along with me — if Trump's response to Clinton's unresolved e-mail scandal is to call her crooked, what exactly does that make Donald Trump? In the meantime, Trump's own unresolved scandal derives from the private dealings of his own organization. Clinton's missing e-mails are actually consistent with the actions of her predecessors — former Secretaries of State — who were also federal employees of the U.S. government.

The point is, Trump, himself, has spent so much time attacking Clinton for something he has done himself, within his own private company, when she was following the protocol of her predecessors. If either party is convicted, neither is blameless, but the latter sounds a whole lot less clandestine than the former. If other secretaries had done the same, why wouldn't Clinton continue the trend?

This is nothing more than pure hypocrisy, bordering on irony. Back in 2006, a Trump IT director testified that until 2001, executives in Trump Tower relied on personal e-mail accounts using dial-up Internet. This occurred despite the fact that Trump had already launched a high-speed Internet provider in 1998 and announced he would wire his whole building with it. Another director said Trump had no regular process for preserving e-mails prior to 2005.

If this is the case, why continue to call Clinton a criminal for doing the same? Just a week ago in a "battle" on Twitter, Trump tweeted Clinton: "And where are your 33,000 e-mails that you deleted?" Afterward, on the CBS News program Face the Nation, Trump explained, "What she did is a criminal situation. She wasn't supposed to do that with the server and the e-mails."

However, back in the Trump Hotels case, defendants pled with the judge to enforce sanctions against Trump for destroying evidence. Trump's company failed to preserve e-mails and "has been regularly destroying data and evidence located on its computer, both before and after this case was filed," according to a motion from May 2007 and the recent USA Today report. One executive of Trump Organization coincidentally replaced his computer in 2005, after Trump filed his complaint against the casino developers.

Trump's own case was settled before the judge ruled upon whether the Trump Organization destroyed evidence. Whether the answers are out there to learn or not, perhaps it would do future presidential candidates well to take serious care before professing another's criminal status — especially when one's own history resembles those accusations.