Trump Sues His Niece and The New York Times Over Leaked Tax Documents

Then-President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on Dec. 7, 2020. (Doug Mills/The New York Times)

Former President Donald Trump filed a lawsuit on Tuesday accusing Mary L. Trump, The New York Times and three of its reporters of conspiring in an “insidious plot” to improperly obtain his confidential tax records and exploit their use in news articles and a book.

The lawsuit claims that the Times reporters, as part of an effort to obtain the tax records, relentlessly sought out Mary Trump, the former president’s niece, and persuaded her “to smuggle the records out of her attorney’s office” and turn them over to The Times.

That action, according to the lawsuit, breached a confidentiality agreement that was part of the settlement of litigation involving the will of the former president’s father, Fred C. Trump, who died in 1999.

Donald Trump’s lawsuit, filed in state Supreme Court in Dutchess County, New York, accuses the newspaper, its reporters and Mary Trump of being motivated “by a personal vendetta and their desire to gain fame, notoriety, acclaim and a financial windfall and were further intended to advance their political agenda.”

The suit comes as the former president continues to argue falsely that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and as his family company, the Trump Organization, and its longtime chief financial officer, Allen H. Weisselberg, have been accused by Manhattan prosecutors of avoiding taxes on employee perks that should have been reported as income. They have pleaded not guilty.

During his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump promised to make his tax returns public, as presidential candidates, including President Joe Biden, have done for at least 40 years. But Trump then refused to release them, citing an ongoing audit. The secrecy surrounding his taxes led to criticism and questions that dogged him throughout his presidency.

The documents that Mary Trump provided were the basis of a 2018 article that delved into what The Times called Donald Trump’s history of tax dodging and outright fraud, according to the lawsuit.

The Times report cast doubt on Trump’s claim that he was a self-made billionaire who rose to wealth and fame with little help from his father, a real estate developer. Instead, the investigation found, Trump inherited the equivalent of at least $413 million, much of it through “dubious tax schemes.”

The Times reported that Trump and his siblings set up a sham corporation to disguise millions of dollars in gifts from their parents, and that Trump helped his father take improper tax deductions worth millions more.

In 2019, three Times reporters — David Barstow, Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner — were awarded a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting for that article and others about Trump’s taxes. In announcing the award, the Pulitzer judges called the work “an exhaustive 18-month investigation” that “revealed a business empire riddled with tax dodges.”

In a statement on Tuesday evening, The Times defended the news organization’s reporting on Trump’s taxes and said it planned to fight the lawsuit.

“The Times’s coverage of Donald Trump’s taxes helped inform the public through meticulous reporting on a subject of overriding public interest,” the statement read. “This lawsuit is an attempt to silence independent news organizations and we plan to vigorously defend against it.”

Trump’s lawsuit asserts that Mary Trump described her “unauthorized disclosure of the confidential records to The Times” in a book she published last year, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.” The suit says that she also made statements in the news media after the book’s publication, “displaying her blatant and wanton disregard for her confidentiality obligations under the settlement agreement.”

The lawsuit seeks compensatory and punitive damages, and says the former president lost at least $100 million as a result of the defendants’ actions.

According to the lawsuit, the litigation stemming from Fred Trump’s will and a lawsuit brought by several family members, including Mary Trump, was settled in 2001 on terms that included “confidentiality and nondisclosure obligations” binding on the parties.

Mary Trump could not immediately be reached for comment on the lawsuit.

Donald Trump ultimately lost a bitter and protracted legal battle that twice reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which resulted in Manhattan prosecutors’ obtaining reams of tax and other financial records from his accountants.

Taxes are also at the center of an ongoing criminal case against Trump’s family business and against Weisselberg, who is accused of avoiding taxes on about $1.7 million in company perks. A trial is scheduled to begin next summer. Prosecutors from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, which has spent years investigating the case, have not accused Trump of wrongdoing.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .

Perhaps, you would love to read the NPR perspectives on this story. Captioned "Trump Sues His Niece Mary And 'The New York Times' Over Tax Return Stories", the National Public Radio reports that  Former President Donald J. Trump has sued The New York Times and several of its reporters, along with one of its key sources - his niece, Mary - for obtaining tens of thousands of pages of his tax documents for an investigation into his finances that won a Pulitzer Prize.

Former President Donald Trump has sued his niece Mary Trump and The New York Times over an award-winning 2018 investigation into how much he paid in taxes.

Douglas P. DeFelice/Getty Images

The articles, published in October 2018, concluded that Trump "participated in dubious tax schemes during the 1990s, including instances of outright fraud.", the report stated.

In a lawsuit filed in a New York state court in Dutchess County according to the report, the former president's attorneys allege that Times reporter Suzanne Craig urged Mary Trump to break a legally binding agreement to keep those documents private as part of a larger settlement over his father's estate. The other Times reporters sued for their involvement in the project were David Barstow and Russ Buettner.

Stating further, the report submits that New York Times signaled it would not back down. "The Times's coverage of Donald Trump's taxes helped inform citizens through meticulous reporting on a subject of overriding public interest," spokesperson Daniella Rhoades-Ha said in a statement shared with NPR. "This lawsuit is an attempt to silence independent news organizations and we plan to vigorously defend against it."

The NPR report continues below:

While Trump has threatened The Times with lawsuits in the past, this is the first time he has sued the paper in his name. The Trump Campaign sued The Times last year. That case was dismissed earlier this year.

Mary Trump's lawyer, Theodore Boutrous, called the lawsuit "frivolous" and part of a pattern of targeting "truthful speech and important journalism on issues of public concern."

"It is doomed to failure like the rest of his baseless efforts to chill freedom of speech and of the press," Boutrous said.

Mary Trump was more blunt, calling her uncle a "loser" in a response to the Daily Beast, which first reported the filing of the lawsuit. "He is going to throw anything against the wall he can," Mary Trump told the Daily Beast of her uncle's suit. "It's desperation."

She became outspoken with her criticism of Donald Trump during his presidency. And she confirmed that she had been a source of the documents for Craig and her colleagues in her best-selling 2020 book about Trump, "Too Much And Never Enough" as well as in a podcast for the Daily Beast in February.

In the lawsuit filed Tuesday, Donald Trump's attorneys claim that Craig and her Times colleagues had actively urged - that is, "procured" - Mary Trump's search for the then-president's past financial documents, purportedly putting the newspaper on the hook legally for his niece's alleged violation of a legal pact to keep them confidential.

That agreement stemmed from an earlier settlement of Mary Trump's challenge of the will of her grandfather Fred, former President Trump's father. Last year, she went to court to sue Donald Trump and two of his siblings, saying they conspired to cheat her of tens of millions of dollars. That suit is ongoing.

Trump's lawyers also allege the reporters were "motivated, at least in part" by actual malice toward the former president. The phrase "actual malice" packs a punch because it is one of the standards used to help determine whether journalists should pay damages over publishing false and libelous claims about public officials or public figures.

Yet Trump made no claims of libel or defamation against the paper or Mary Trump in the suit. At the heart of this case are a breach of contract allegation against Mary Trump and a claim of tortious interference against the Times and its reporters, that is, that the newspaper knew it was explicitly seeking Trump's niece to break her confidentiality agreement. Trump did not specify how his fortunes were harmed by the article.

A judge previously ruled that the confidentiality pact was too vaguely worded to prevent Mary Trump from publishing her book and that her publisher, Simon & Schuster, was not bound by it anyway.

The courts have typically given news outlets broad latitude to report on the private affairs of elected officials on the grounds that the public deserves to understand the people in whom they invest public powers.