Billy Bush Claims 'The Apprentice' Producer Mark Burnett Is Protecting a 'Vault' Full of Tapes Featuring Donald Trump Making Lewd Comments

Billy Bush is continuing to pull back the curtain on what went down when he worked for NBC as Donald Trump's series The Apprentice was on the air.

The media personality appeared on the Friday, September 26, installment of Jim Acosta's Substack, where they discussed the infamous video of the president telling Bush in 2006 that he can "grab" women "by the p-----" because of his fame and fortune. The clip came out one month before the 2016 presidential election.

Bush recalled how the scandal came to be, explaining, "NBC put out an APB for all tapes. When this came out, it was because a contestant in a Miss Universe pageant had said, ‘Donald Trump has said terrible things about me.' And [Trump] said, ‘I never talk like that at all.’ And then NBC sent out to all their divisions: 'Look for your tapes.'"

"Now, the ones they wanted belonged to [producer] Mark Burnett and are in a vault somewhere in Idaho, and those are all the outtakes from The Apprentice set," he claimed.

"But someone at Access Hollywood said, ‘Oh, wait a minute. We have that thing from 11 years ago. What about that?’ So then they took that and sent it to NBC News, hoping to, you know — Access Hollywood, the tiniest little division of NBC News that’s not even recognized — like, ‘Look, look what we did! We’ve got the thing!’" the Extra correspondent said.

"That’s how it came to light," Bush stated. "They scoured that and scoured everything else in every drawer that they could to find anything on him. And that was deemed enough. And it wasn’t."

While Trump went on to win the election, Bush was fired from Today, as he laughed during their misogynistic conversation.

"I'm embarrassed and ashamed," he said in a statement when the footage was uncovered. "It's no excuse, but this happened 11 years ago — I was younger, less mature, and acted foolishly in playing along. I'm very sorry." Meanwhile, the president brushed off their conversation as "locker room" talk.

The fallout took a serious toll on Bush's mental health, as he admitted in July, "I did everything I could think of to keep myself from jumping off the building."

"I was about to get a huge paycheck, my first really big paycheck," he recalled on Rob Lowe's podcast. "I'm at the Today show. They still have money. They're the last thing in linear television with real money on the news side."

Fortunately, his brother, Jonathan Bush, helped him through the rough patch. "My brother is my best friend, and when his marriage and world fell apart, I was there for him," he explained. "And in this case, he was there for me. And I would never have survived without him."

Billy returned to television in 2019.