Donald Trump statement on banning Muslims from US disappears from his website

Exclusive: Passage posted on 7 December 2015 mysteriously vanishes late on day of election

A statement on Donald Trump's plan to ban all Muslims from entering the US has mysteriously disappeared from his website.

On the same night that millions of votes were pouring in for the real estate mogul turned politician, the page linking to his December 2015 statement was removed.

The page now redirects to a page encouraging voters to donate to his campaign.

The page was available on the morning of the election on 8 November, according to online caches studied by The Independent. But the redirect was added later the same night.

Caches like the Wayback Machine work by crawling websites intermittently and making a copy of what it finds there. As such, it is not possible to say exactly what time the redirect was added, but only that the change had been made between those two times it was crawled.

Mr Trump was widely condemned for his call shortly after the terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015 to temporarily ban all Muslims from entering the country until he figured out "what the hell was going on".

The Republican and his allies have consistently defended the ban, insisting the measure was about Americans’ "safety" and not about discriminating against religion. Videos and speeches defending the ban remain on the Trump campaign website.

The Trump campaign could not be immediately contacted.

It would not be the first time the Trump team has scrubbed pages from its websites.

After speculation rose that Melania Trump did not not complete her university degree, her biography page was taken down and redirected to the homepage for Mr Trump’s golf course.

Mr Trump won the presidential election on 8 November with 279 electoral votes.