(RepublicanInformer.com)- On Tuesday, former President Donald Trump decided to sue his niece, Mary Trump, as well as the New York Times. The suit comes as a result of stories the paper published, citing his niece, that had to do with Trump’s finances and taxes.
The former president is seeking at least $100 million in damages from the suit. He’s accusing his niece of violating a non-disclosure agreement when she leaked his personal tax information to the paper.
Alina Habba, an attorney for Trump, filed the complaint in Dutchess County Supreme Court in New York. The complaint reads:
“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 defendants’ actions were 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 lawsuit further claims that the three reporters for the Times — Russell Buettner, David Barstow and Susanne Craig — went on an “extensive crusade” to obtain the tax records of the former president, and “relentlessly sought out his niece, Mary L. Trump, and convinced her to smuggle the records out of her attorney’s office and turn them over to The Times.”
The three reporters ended up winning a Pulitzer Prize in 2019 for the coverage they published about Trump’s taxes and finances. As such, the lawsuit alleges that the paper tried to capitalize on the former president’s tax records through “their publication of various news articles.”
The Times isn’t going to let this go by softly, though. Danielle Rhoades Ha, a spokesperson for the paper, said the company will fight Trump’s lawsuit.
In an email to the New York Post, she wrote:
“The Times’s coverage of Donald Trump’s taxes helped inform citizens through meticulous reporting on a subject of overriding public interest. This lawsuit is an attempt to silence independent news organizations and we plan to vigorously defend against it.”
As for Mary Trump, she released a statement to the Daily Beast calling the lawsuit “desperation” by the former president.
The Daily Beast reported that Mary Trump said:
“I think he is a f–king loser, and he is going to throw anything against the wall he can. 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.”
Trump’s lawsuit says there was a non-disclosure agreement signed between Mary and Donald Trump during an ongoing legal battle over the estate of the former president’s father, who was Mary’s grandfather.
Fred Trump died in 1999, and while assets belonging to him and his wife were being fought over by the family, Mary Trump was able to get 40,000 pages of documents during discovery.
The lawsuit says all parties were forced to sign a confidentiality agreement.
But in 2016, Mary Trump ended up sharing those documents with Craig, the reporter from The Times, violating the agreement, the lawsuit states.
