OK - I'll admit I haven't paid attention to the news much lately, but can someone explain why this is all hitting the news now? Presumably these tapes weren't that hard to get a hold of, so why didn't the GOP make this public before Trump won the nomination rather than getting stuck with an October surprise?
Honestly, they probably either never bothered looking for it or just bumped into it while looking for something else - there are thousands of hours of TV stuff archived and a lot of the off-air stuff isn't archived at all well since they'll probably assume that its not something that they'll ever need to look at again, and most of the time its probably mind-bendingly boring. They might have been reviewing their archives for Trump (and Clinton most likely as well) for things that they could use and just accidentally bumped into it right now, they might even just be reviewing a bunch of stuff that wasn't cataloged very well and ended up randomly finding it - that's how a lot of the interesting sh**t is found: the WWE recently bumped into an old Wrestling match that no one thought had been taped that had this mythic reputation as being really good just based on written stories about it and a few pictures ("The Lost Battle of Atlanta" is the name if anyone cares or is interested; it was at a House Show and not produced for TV), and they actually only ended up finding it when they were digitising and cataloging a bunch of old Omni live event tapes that mostly contained stuff of no real interest when they bumped into it. Its possibly a reason why the board room stuff hasn't come out yet (the big one is probably that the producers want to avoid embarrassment or protect Trump for some reason); the fact is that with how many series of the US Apprentice they were and I assume how long the board room segments took to tape unless he was dropping those sort of comments left and right or someone would publicly name a particular show it may well take a long time to find those things; and its not like the company has the staff to have given one person a job of checking everything that Donald Trump said. Consider also that its probably only been a few years since TV stations went to recording things on hard drives rather than digital video tape and the like (I don't know about these shows; but a lot of UK TV shows still recorded on digibeta until they moved to HD); lots of the off-air stuff probably isn't easily available in a computerised format and you then you have to start transferring it from another medium, and that's honestly a bit of a faff and lengthens the process even more.
Tl;dr: TV archives for non-broadcast stuff aren't perfect, especially if you go back to a time when they still recorded on tape.
