I. The Tapes

On an unseasonably warm Monday, in late December 2015, members of the Hillary Clinton campaign for president gathered at their headquarters, in a nondescript brown-brick high-rise on the border of Brooklyn Heights, to strategize about an increasingly crucial matter. The offices were humming with enthusiastic young employees and volunteers; flinty Christmas decorations adorned cubicles; American flags hung from the walls; big blue beanbags were strewn on the floor. By nine A.M., more than two dozen people, including campaign chairman John Podesta, had piled into a conference room on an upper floor, or called in via Google Hangouts, for the consequential eight-and-a-half-hour meeting dubbed “the Research Summit.” The agenda was focused entirely on one thing: devising the campaign’s strategy against each of Clinton’s potential Republican foes in the forthcoming general election.

While the battle for the Republican nomination had begun with 17 people, it was becoming increasingly clear that Clinton, if she defeated Bernie Sanders, would likely face one of three challengers: Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, or, unexpectedly, Donald Trump. Consequently, staffers had been provided “oppo books,” political jargon for opposition-research volumes, on each man. These documents included countless news articles written about each candidate, legislative records, and public quotes. As staffers read the research reports that day, they discussed Rubio (whose oppo book was 431 pages long), Cruz (201 pages), and Trump (a comparatively thin 157 pages), covering each one’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities.

Video: Donald Trump’s Finest Fibs

While Cruz was clearly a possible contender, many in the room agreed that Rubio, with his youth and charisma, posed the most considerable challenge. And then there was Trump, who was characterized in the meeting under “the four B’s”: a bully, a bigot, a bad businessman, and—as some staffers noted—not a billionaire. (There was discussion of a fifth B, which, in typical Democratic jargon, was “blithe.”) Trump’s oppo book was slim not because Clinton staffers had missed details regarding his divorces or corporate bankruptcies. It was short because they didn’t think he had much of a chance of winning the G.O.P. nomination.

Trump’s oppo book, however, did make 16 references to his 11-year tenure on The Apprentice, his reality-television program. It noted, in particular, footage of Trump telling one female contestant that “it must be a pretty picture, you dropping to your knees.” As staffers reviewed the file, one person familiar with the meeting told me, someone made an unusual suggestion: while this clip could be damaging, there might be far more impactful raw footage of Trump saying outlandish things that had ended up on the cutting-room floor. The person suggested that the campaign scour those outtakes for any such material, if it existed.

Another staffer present at the meeting argued that such a hunt would be a waste of resources and time. Money was better devoted elsewhere, such as looking at the possibility that Trump-branded clothing was made in China. The two started to debate if it was worth devoting resources to look for some tapes that no one was certain even existed. Then someone else in the room, who had ties to Hollywood, interjected that she had heard, anyway, that Trump “always stuck to his cue cards during the taping.” On that note, the suggested hunt for any potential outtakes was tabled—at least for the time being.

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.

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.)

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.)

But most of those 1,300 employees didn’t have access to the tapes. And the few who might, I was told, feared reprisals, or simply worried that blowing a whistle would prevent them from getting jobs on the sets of other reality programs. “They are all terrified of being sued,” one person who worked in the industry told me. “Most of these people are freelancers, and there is no one that is going to protect them.” Mark Burnett, the eminence behind programs such as Survivor, The Voice, and The Apprentice, who had earned a fortune worth hundreds of millions of dollars, had once sued someone for leaking Survivor secrets. BuzzFeed reported that Burnett, who had supported Democrats in the past, had threatened to sue employees who released any un-aired footage of The Apprentice. (In a statement, Burnett would subsequently deny the report.)

I spoke to several people who had talked to Burnett about the tapes and asked him why he wouldn’t release un-aired footage, even anonymously. One person said that Burnett had told them he did not have the power. Several people, however, offered another point. Burnett has been able to persuade countless minor celebrities to come on his shows with the implicit promise that he would never make them look bad. (Howard Stern had also said that he felt it would be a “betrayal” for him to replay his old radio interviews with Trump.) If a tape of one of the most significant people in Burnett’s portfolio leaked, Burnett worried, according to these people, his reputation could be diminished. (A spokesperson for Burnett and MGM directed me to a previous public statement indicating that Burnett had neither the right nor the ability to release any outtakes.)

Burnett may not have been the only mogul troubled about the conflict between his business interests and his political beliefs. After Trump’s callous remarks concerning immigrants, in mid-2015, NBC and Univision decided to drop the Miss Universe and Miss USA pageants, which Trump had owned or co-owned since 1996. Soon after, the talent agency WME-IMG, whose co-C.E.O. is Trump’s former agent Ari Emanuel (the brother of Rahm Emanuel, the former Obama chief of staff and current Chicago mayor), bought the Miss Universe media property for $28 million. Miss Universe, like The Apprentice, was a massive production involving multiple cameras and hours of unused footage. According to someone present during one of the productions, Trump made misogynistic statements about the women contestants on the show.

I was told by one insider that Trump would stand onstage, talking about the women’s “tits” and which contestants he would like to sleep with. When one staunch Clinton supporter approached Emanuel about releasing such footage, an industry executive told me, Emanuel demurred, saying that he stayed away from politics. Yet, during the election, Trump bragged to a trade magazine that Emanuel “calls me a lot. I call him a lot and we talk. He’s very political.” (When Emanuel met with Trump shortly after he won the election, according to several people, agents at WME were frantically assuring their clients that their boss was a “Democrat” and didn’t support Trump. Emanuel could not be reached for comment.)

According to a person familiar with the matter, a few weeks before the election, employees at Miss Universe started looking through the pageant’s archives for potentially damaging footage of Trump. While some of the clips they discovered were crude, the raw footage wasn’t more provocative than anything Trump had already said in public. The employees soon learned that most of the early footage that was presumed to be more reckless had been lost, and some was even destroyed in a warehouse fire years earlier. Additionally, according to this source and another person familiar with the show, producers at Miss Universe avoided putting a microphone on Trump until the show actually began taping, fearing that if his comments ever came out they would hurt the brand.

III. The Hunt

After Trump officially accepted the Republican nomination, in the summer, the Clinton campaign began research on The Apprentice. At the campaign’s Brooklyn headquarters, researchers would eventually speak to former contestants, one of whom would tell them about a few alleged degrading incidents involving Trump. (According to documents I obtained, which would eventually be added to the oppo book on Trump, now several thousand pages long, a number of contestants came forward regarding his comments about women.) “He said they had better breasts because they were real,” the contestant told the campaign, referring to women on the show. Another Clinton researcher began asking about outtakes of the show, if they existed, and what was on them.

The public, however, had no idea that journalists and political operatives were reaching out to people associated with The Apprentice. But that was all about to change. One morning in early October, David Fahrenthold awoke at 5:30, as he did each day, clambered out of bed, and began his workday. Fahrenthold, a 38-year-old reporter for The Washington Post, had been investigating Trump’s claim that he had donated millions to charity. Each day, Fahrenthold called dozens of nonprofits, one by one, to ask if Trump had indeed given them money. As it turned out, almost universally, he had not. Today would be more of the same. After he fed his kids and kissed his wife good-bye, Fahrenthold took the Red Line to the Post offices on K Street, ready for another day of hitting the phone lines.

At around 11 A.M., however, Fahrenthold was sitting in his cubicle (which was covered with remnants of past reporting projects, including a bumper sticker for a story he had written in 2004 about East Coast versus West Coast Bigfoot-hunters) when his phone rang. The caller asked if Fahrenthold wanted to see a tape of Trump from an Access Hollywood interview saying extremely lewd things about women. A moment later, the reporter loaded the three-minute clip onto his computer, slipped his headphones over his ears, and began watching. “I did try and fuck her. She was married,” Trump said to Billy Bush in the now infamous video from 2005. “I moved on her like a bitch.” Then the clincher, when Trump bragged that he can do whatever he wants to women, including “grab ‘em by the pussy.”

The story, which was published just after four P.M. on that Friday, instantly exploded on the Internet. Hashtags started dotting social media, with #trumpTapes, #justThe-Beginning, and #releaseTheTapes becoming trending topics. By Saturday, Bill Pruitt, who worked on The Apprentice, tweeted, “As a producer on seasons 1 & 2 of #theApprentice I assure you: when it comes to the #trumptapes there are far worse.” News outlets from the far left to the far right picked up the story. The actor Tom Arnold eventually joined the fray, tweeting about the alleged tapes in a manner which suggested that he had seen outtake footage. (“Having seen some of the raw footage of Trump on The Apprentice,” Arnold says, “I’m confident that, if it would have come out, it would have changed the results of the election.”)

In the days after the Access Hollywood tape was released, while this tumult was taking place in the media, Burnett and MGM remained silent. Meanwhile, additional security guards were placed on the ground and executive floors of MGM Studios on North Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills, a source familiar with the situation told me. Guests who visited those floors were no longer allowed to take the elevators alone to meet employees, but now had to have a chaperone by their side. Employees were warned not to speak to the press about the tapes or The Apprentice. Publicly, the pressure continued to mount for Burnett to release the tapes.

Finally, on Monday evening, Burnett and MGM released a statement saying that Burnett simply “does not have the ability or the right to release footage or other material from The Apprentice,” citing legal and contractual obligations that would prohibit such a move. They also denied the reports of threatened litigation against former Apprenticeemployees, saying that was “completely and unequivocally false.” (One person who had worked on the show told me that they had been asked by a supervisor not to speak to anyone, especially the press, about anything they had seen on the show.)

The media (which know full well that people don’t simply “release” footage with legal restrictions but, rather, that they “leak” it without their name attached) grew even more frustrated by Burnett’s statement and continued contacting people once associated with The Apprentice. In the meantime, the civil-rights lawyer Gloria Allred held a press conference in front of the MGM offices, demanding that the “tapes should be released.” IAC’s Barry Diller told Politico that the statement put out by MGM and Burnett was “total bullshit” and that there was absolutely no legal obligation not to make outtakes available. Online petitions to release the tapes quickly gathered close to 180,000 signatures.

By Wednesday, after The New York Times reported on other women who said that they had been groped or sexually assaulted by Trump, Burnett released another, final statement. “I am NOT ‘Pro-Trump,’ ” he wrote in a statement, in which MGM reiterated that it would not release outtakes of The Apprentice. But by then, with so much outcry about the Access Hollywood footage, anything that could have happened on the set of The Apprentice seemed superfluous. Many assumed that Trump was going to lose the election handily. Nate Silver, the renowned forecaster, gave Trump a 14 percent chance of victory. At the Times, the Upshot pegged his likelihood of winning at 11 percent. Nevertheless, the Clinton campaign, which had seen Trump survive previous raucous scandals, refused to give up its own search. Two days before the election, one entertainment executive with ties to Clinton contacted someone in the industry who had said he had a copy of a tape depicting Trump that could create problems for the then candidate. Would this person be willing to pass him the footage to give to the Clinton campaign? Since the latest poll numbers indicated it was clear Clinton would win the election—likely in a landslide—this person didn’t want to risk it.

IV. The Defeat

One year after I first heard about these alleged tapes, and almost a month after Trump won the presidency, I was invited to Harvard’s Institute of Politics to attend a postmortem with operatives from the top campaigns for president, including the teams behind Cruz, Rubio, Sanders, Trump, and Clinton. The two-day event was bizarre for so many reasons—not least of which was seeing the winners and losers of a vicious war meeting in person to antagonistically compare their tactics. But it was also strange to see people in the hallways, and during the cocktail hour, still discussing those Apprentice outtakes.

Several people in Hollywood have also told me during the past few months, however, that they were skeptical whether any kind of footage could have had an impact. Trump, after all, had already proclaimed that he grabbed women’s genitals; he called Mexican undocumented immigrants rapists; he had refused to acknowledge that President Obama was born in the United States; he threatened to jail Hillary Clinton; he encouraged Russia to hack into Clinton’s e-mails; he waved his arms in the air to make fun of someone with a physical disability. Trump had a valid point when he said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”

As much as the tapes may have become a fixation for political operatives, journalists, and so many people in Hollywood, they may have also become a white whale during the campaign. Without the prospect of the tapes, maybe Clinton’s campaign would have arranged more rallies in the Rust Belt. News outlets may have focused more on understanding why so many Americans had stuck Trump-Pence signs on their lawns.

As he enters the White House with the lowest approval rating of any president-elect in recent history, re-writes the rules of diplomacy, and sides with Vladimir Putin over the C.I.A., Trump appears to have his hands full. Not only is he about to run the country, he’s also still the executive producer of The Apprentice. And while Burnett has vehemently denied that he was “pro-Trump” before the election, he is now meeting with the president-elect about his inauguration. (After requests for comment, the Trump transition team responded with a fuzzy photocopy of Nielsen ratings from April 21, 2004, indicating that The Apprentice was No. 1 in the 18-to-49 demographic. As the spokesperson wrote to me, “This speaks for itself.”)