For more than a decade, between 2004 and 2015, Donald Trump sat in a leather chair pulled up to a long wooden table, as sleek as a bowling lane, more than 180 times. In a Brioni suit, with his cotton-candy hair, he climbed into the costume of himself and praised, berated, jostled, and bewitched his contestants on The Apprentice, inevitably ending the conversation with his trademark catchphrase, “You’re fired!” Viewers of the program adored, or at least found themselves amused by, Trump’s theatrics. But, for journalists, the Clinton campaign, and many people inside Hollywood, what Trump may have said between takes became a year-long fixation.

During the entire protracted campaign cycle, countless journalists, including myself, found themselves searching in vain for the so-called Trump tapes, or various outtakes and B-roll that had captured Trump speaking extemporaneously. Given the sheer number of hours required to shoot a television show over 11 seasons, many assumed all that raw footage might contain a moment or two that Trump would have preferred to keep private. And given how hard it was to decipher what Trump truly believed during the campaign cycle—did he really want to build a wall around Mexico or start a Muslim registry?—many journalists hoped that the outtakes could reveal more truthful insights into his character and policies.

Throughout the year, the tapes were a subject of almost mythical fascination within the media. People involved with The Apprentice had received calls from reporters at the Associated Press, BuzzFeed, Politico, The New York Times, CNN, the Huffington Post, and The Washington Post. Meanwhile, the Clinton campaign would also obsessively try to find the tapes up until Election Day. In fact, one person close to the Clinton campaign told me that he had spoken to someone, on the Sunday before the election, who said he had a damaging clip of Trump.

But The Apprentice outtakes, whatever they contained, were never made public. And despite losing the popular vote by more than two and a half million ballots, Trump decisively secured an electoral-college victory by often slim margins—by around 120,000 votes in Florida, 68,000 in Pennsylvania, 23,000 in Wisconsin, and 11,000 in Michigan. Could the tapes have changed that outcome? In the aftermath of Trump’s victory, many journalists, political operatives, and even celebrities have told me that they aren’t sure. But they’ve also said that one force impeded their hunt. Curiously, it was just about the most liberal place on earth: Hollywood.

UNREAL Trump with Mark Burnett, 2004. By Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images.

II. The Vault

It’s no surprise that people’s imaginations would be stoked by the specter of Apprentice outtakes. Not only did Trump have a propensity for vile language in public settings, and on Twitter, but there were also a lot of potential leakers out there. In all, almost 1,300 people worked on The Apprentice during Trump’s run on the show—including executive, segment, and field producers; editors; loggers; set dressers; and gaffers. A few weeks after the Clinton campaign began discussing the outtakes, I got a phone call from a person in Los Angeles who had a tip for me. This person had heard from someone involved with the show that tapes existed of Trump that were, as this person put it, “insane.” This source suggested that the comments were more provocative than when Trump said of Megyn Kelly that she had “blood coming out of her wherever,” or when he said that a Black Lives Matter protester at one of his rallies perhaps should have been “roughed up,” or even when he advocated the “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”

Over the course of the year, I would hear incredible allegations. But nothing ever materialized. I was told that any footage would be difficult to get hold of. The putative “tapes,” a source said, actually referred to mere moments within an almost incomprehensibly large volume of footage—larger than anyone likely could have fathomed. While the boardroom scenes of The Apprentice accounted for only about a third of the one- or two-hour-long television show, Trump and his producers were in that room for several hours per episode taping. There could be between 10 and 12 cameras, which would often be rolling the entire time. Sometimes, according to one person involved with the show, Trump would say things to rile up the contestants, perhaps so that the camera could capture reaction shots that would entertain viewers at home. Most of the time, some said, Trump just yammered about what was on his mind. These comments could be misogynistic, I was told. At other times, they could be self-referential. (People who had worked with Trump on The Apprentice had heard that he would be in the 2016 race for two months at the most, then he’d be back on reality TV.)

“HE SAID THEY HAD BETTER BREASTS BECAUSE THEY WERE REAL.”

Either way, there was lots of potential footage. The thousands of hours of video would be digitized, logged, and edited. The extra footage was then put onto a drive and archived in a vault. One person said they were likely stored in a secure vault at NBC Studios in Universal City. Another person told me they could have been moved to a completely different vault belonging to MGM Studios. And, in a more likely scenario, someone else said they were stored in a secure facility at an entirely different location. (Though it was broadcast on NBC, MGM technically owned The Apprentice and any historical footage of it after acquiring, in 2014 and 2015, the production company that previously had owned the show.)