Donald Trump Sues New York Times and His Niece Mary Trump Over Tax
Former President Donald Trump has filed a lawsuit against The New York Times, three of its reporters, and his niece—claiming they hatched an “insidious plot” to obtain his private records for a story about his tax history.
The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in Dutchess County, New York, by attorney Alina Habba, alleges that the newspaper convinced Mary Trump to “smuggle records out of her attorney’s office and turn them over to The Times” despite her having signed a confidentiality agreement in 2001 after settling a contentious legal battle over the will of Frederick Trump, Donald’s father and Mary’s grandfather.
The new suit seeks damages “in an amount to be determined at trial, but believed to be no less than One Hundred Million Dollars” from both Mary Trump and the Times.
It follows a suit filed by Charles Harder on behalf of Donald Trump’s brother Robert to try and stop Mary Trump and publisher Simon & Schuster from releasing her memoir, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.
Judge Hal Greenwald ruled in that case that the 2001 confidentiality agreement had been too vaguely defined to stop her from writing about the sitting president and noted that her publisher had not been a signatory to that agreement. Robert Trump died in August 2020.
While Times reporters David Barstow, Susanne Craig, and Russ Buettner—who won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting in 2019 for what they revealed about the taxes the former president had refused to disclose, and how little he’d paid in federal income taxes—also weren’t party to the confidentiality agreement Mary Trump had signed in 2001, the former president’s new suit claims they were “directly responsible,” citing her interview with Molly Jong-Fast on The Daily Beast’s The New Abnormal podcast while claiming the reporters were “motivated, at least in part, by their actual malice” toward Trump:
Molly Jong-Fast: You were ultimately the source for the tax story.
Mary Trump: Yeah, um, I’m actually really proud of that. But I have to be honest with you, I didn’t even remember I had [the Confidential Records]. It’s entirely down to the brilliant Susanne Craig for, one, reminding me that I had them and, two, so effectively and tenaciously trying to convince—I mean it took her months before I did—so it’s entirely down to her.
“I think he is a fucking loser, and he is going to throw anything against the wall he can,” said Mary Trump of her uncle’s new suit. “It’s desperation. The walls are closing in and he is throwing anything against the wall that will stick. As is always the case with Donald, he’ll try and change the subject.”
In something of the same spirit in which the former president often credited himself with boosting ratings at the news networks he considered his enemies, the suit notes that “The 2018 article received a record-breaking amount of attention, garnering more views than any previous…
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