Trump sues New York Times, niece over ’18 article on taxes
NEW YORK — Former President Donald Trump has sued his estranged niece and The New York Times over a 2018 article about his family’s wealth and tax practices that was partly based on confidential documents she provided to the newspaper’s reporters.
Trump’s lawsuit, filed Tuesday in state court in New York, accuses Mary Trump of breaching a settlement agreement by disclosing tax records she received in a dispute over the estate of family patriarch Fred Trump.
The lawsuit accuses the Times and investigative reporters Susanne Craig, David Barstow and Russell Buettner of relentlessly seeking out Mary Trump as a source of information and persuading her to turn over documents. The suit alleges that the reporters were aware that the settlement agreement barred her from disclosing the documents.
The Times’ article challenged Trump’s claims of selfmade wealth by documenting how his father, Fred, had given him at least $413 million over the decades, including through tax avoidance schemes.
Mary Trump identified herself in a book published last year as the source of the documents provided to the Times.
Trump’s lawsuit alleges that Mary Trump, the Times and its reporters “were motivated by a personal vendetta” against him and a desire to push a political agenda.
The defendants “engaged in an insidious plot to obtain confidential and highly-sensitive records which they exploited for their own benefit and utilized as a means of falsely legitimizing their publicized works,” the lawsuit said.
In a statement to NBC News, Mary Trump said of her uncle: “I think he is a loser, and he is going to throw anything against the wall he can. It’s desperation. The walls are closing in and he is throwing anything against the wall that he thinks will stick. As is always the case with Donald, he’ll try and change the subject.”
A Times spokesperson, Danielle Rhoads Ha, said the lawsuit “is an attempt to silence independent news organizations, and we plan to vigorously defend against it.”
The Times’ coverage of Trump’s tax practices, she said, “helped inform citizens through meticulous reporting on a subject of overriding public interest.”
Craig responded in a tweet: “I knocked on Mary Trump’s door. She opened it. I think they call that journalism.”
Trump filed his lawsuit almost a year to the day after Mary Trump sued him over allegations that he and two of his siblings cheated her out of millions of dollars over several decades while squeezing her out of the family business. That case is pending. Mary Trump, 56, is the daughter of Donald Trump’s brother, Fred Trump Jr., who died in 1981 at age 42. Mary Trump was 16 at the time.
Donald Trump’s lawsuit focuses only on the Times’ 2018 story, a Pulitzer Prize winner for explanatory reporting. It makes no mention of another Times scoop on Trump’s tax practices last year, which found he paid no federal income taxes in 10 of the previous 15 years.
According to the lawsuit, Mary Trump came into possession of more than 40,000 pages of “highly sensitive, proprietary, private and confidential documents” through a legal case involving Fred Trump’s will.
The documents including financial records, accounting, tax returns, bank statements and legal papers pertaining to Donald Trump, Fred Trump and their businesses, the lawsuit said.
In 2001, about two years after Fred Trump died, Mary Trump and other family members entered into a settlement agreement with confidentiality and nondisclosure clauses that barred them from sharing information about Fred Trump’s estate, including in newspaper articles, the lawsuit said. The agreement also covered the estate of Fred’s wife, Mary Anne Trump, who died in 2000.
The Times’ article said Donald Trump and his father avoided gift and inheritance taxes by methods including setting up a sham corporation and undervaluing assets to tax authorities.