Former US president Donald Trump on Tuesday filed a $100 million lawsuit against his estranged niece Mary Trump and therefore the ny Times, alleging they engaged in “an insidious plot” to get his tax returns for the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation of his finances.
The lawsuit, filed in Dutchess County, ny state, says that ny Times reporters Susanne Craig, David Barstow and Russ Buettner conducted “an extensive crusade to get Donald J. Trump’s confidential tax records.”
“The defendants engaged in an insidious plot to get confidential and highly-sensitive records which they exploited for his or her own benefit and utilized as a way of falsely legitimizing their publicized works,” the lawsuit says, alleging they were “motivated by a private vendetta.”
The ny Times and therefore the three journalists won the Pulitzer in 2019 for his or her investigation of the Trump family’s finances, which the Pulitzer Prize Board said “debunked his claims of self-made wealth and revealed a business empire riddled with tax dodges.”
The newspaper’s story alleged that Trump had received quite $400 million in today’s terms from his father’s land empire, much of it through fraudulent tax schemes.
Mary was the daughter of the eldest Trump brother Fred Trump Jr, who died in 1981 from complications thanks to alcoholism.
In her no-holds-barred 2020 memoir, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,” she revealed that she was the first source for the ny Times investigation.
‘Loser‘
Trump’s 27-page lawsuit asserts that the ny Times reporters “relentlessly sought out his niece, Mary L. Trump, and convinced her to smuggle the records out of her attorney’s office and switch them over to the days .”
Times reporter Craig tweeted early Wednesday: “I knocked on Mary Trump’s door. She opened it. i feel they call that journalism.”
The lawsuit alleges that, by providing information, Mary Trump was in violation of a non-disclosure agreement signed in 2001 after a settlement over the estate of Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump Sr.
The former president is seeking $100 million in compensation and damages, also as all the proceeds from his niece’s book.
In a statement quoted by NBC, Mary Trump called her uncle “a loser.”
“It’s desperation. The walls are closing in and he’s throwing anything against the wall that he thinks will stick,” she said.
“As is usually the case with Donald, he’ll attempt to change the topic .”
Trump is under investigation in ny for tax fraud and other alleged wrongdoings concerning the financial activities of his Trump Organization.
The Department of Justice in August also ordered the Treasury to supply a congressional committee with six years of records that Trump has long refused to form public.
US presidents aren’t required by law to release details of their personal finances, but every US leader since Nixon has done so.
Trump repeatedly said he would release them pending an audit but ultimately broke with the tradition.
“The Times’s coverage of Donald Trump’s taxes helped inform citizens through meticulous reporting on a topic of overriding public interest,” Danielle Rhoades Ha, a spokeswoman for the paper, said during a statement quoted by US media.
“This lawsuit is an effort to silence independent news organizations and that we decide to vigorously defend against it.”
