Donald Trump has filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against his niece Mary Trump, 56, and the newspaper The New York Times for exposing your tax information. Mary Trump gave tens of thousands of documents about the Republican’s family finances to three newspaper reporters for an investigation that revealed in 2018 how the Republican amassed his fortune based on fraud and tax evasion. The former president of the United States accuses his niece of having violated a confidentiality agreement signed by the family after the death of her father, Fred Trump. The New York tycoon seeks compensation for damages of more than 100 million dollars.
Investigative journalists from the Times, Susanne Craig, David Barstow and Russ Buettner “convinced” Mary Trump to “smuggle” 40,000 confidential documents from her attorneys’ office and deliver them to her, the lawsuit describes. “I knocked on Mary Trump’s door. She opened it, ”Craig tweeted Wednesday. “I think they call that journalism,” he said. “The actions of Mary Trump and the defendants of the Times they were motivated, at least in part, by their actual malice towards the plaintiff, ”the complaint reads.
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After 18 months of investigation, the journalists discovered that the ex-president received 413 million dollars from his father throughout his life thanks to dubious tax schemes and fraud. The article earned them a Pulitzer Prize in the explanatory reporting category. When it came to light, Trump called it “boring” and his attorney, Charles Harder, claimed that the allegations of fraud and tax evasion were “100% false and highly defamatory.”
A spokesperson for the Times He defended in a statement that the newspaper’s coverage of Trump’s taxes helped inform citizens through “meticulous articles” on “an issue of primary public concern.” “This lawsuit is an attempt to silence independent news organizations and we plan to vigorously defend ourselves against it,” he said. Trump did not want to make his tax return public during the 2016 or 2020 presidential campaigns, breaking with a tradition that all candidates in modern history have followed.
Mary Trump, a doctor in clinical psychology, published the book in mid-2020 Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. In the letter, the daughter of the younger brother of the then US president acknowledged that in 2017 she gave 19 boxes of documents to journalists from the Times for your investigation into Trump’s finances. These were “highly sensitive, proprietary, private and confidential documents,” the lawsuit argues, from a legal case related to Fred Trump’s will, including financial records, tax returns, bank statements.
The Republican’s niece and her brother signed a confidentiality agreement in 2001 after reaching an agreement on the distribution of Fred Trump’s will. They both received an undisclosed amount. Mary Trump responded to the lawsuit by assuring that her uncle “is a loser, and he is going to throw everything he can against the wall. It’s desperation, “he said in a statement.
The lawsuit ignores the exclusive Times which found that Trump did not pay federal income taxes in 10 of the previous 15 years. And that in 2016 and 2017 it only disbursed $ 750, respectively. In a statement released this Wednesday by Trump, cited by The Washington Post, the Republican threatened that more lawsuits would come “even on other people and the fake news media.”
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