‘It’s desperation’: Trump sues niece and New York
Times over bombshell tax story
Lawsuit alleges Mary Trump and NYT ‘were motivated by
personal vendetta’ against him and a desire to push political agenda
Donald Trump is seeking $100m in damages.
Associated
Press
Wed 22 Sep
2021 12.56 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/22/donald-trump-sues-niece-new-york-times-tax-story
Former US
president Donald Trump has sued his estranged niece and The New York Times over
a 2018 story 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 in state court in New York on Tuesday, accuses Mary Trump of
breaching a settlement agreement by disclosing tax records she received in a
dispute over family patriarch Fred Trump’s estate.
The lawsuit
accuses the Times and three of its investigative reporters, Susanne Craig,
David Barstow and Russell Buettner, of relentlessly seeking out Mary Trump as a
source of information and convincing her to turn over documents. The suit
claims the reporters were aware the settlement agreement barred her from
disclosing the documents.
The Times’s
story challenged Trump’s claims of self-made wealth by documenting how his
father, Fred, had given him at least $413m 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.
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’s
coverage of Trump’s taxes, she said, “helped inform citizens through meticulous
reporting on a subject of overriding public interest”.
One of the
Times reporters, Craig, responded in a tweet: “I knocked on Mary Trump’s door.
She opened it. I think they call that journalism.”
Trump is
seeking $100m in damages.
Trump’s
lawsuit alleges 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.
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.
Trump’s
lawsuit focuses only on the Times’s 2018 story, a Pulitzer Prize winner for
explanatory reporting. It makes no mention of another Times scoop on Trump’s
taxes 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, accountings, tax returns, bank
statements, and legal papers pertaining to Donald Trump, Fred Trump and their
businesses, Trump’s 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 non-disclosure
clauses that barred them from sharing information about Fred Trump’s estate in,
among other venues, newspaper stories, Trump’s lawsuit said.
The
agreement also covered the estate of Fred’s wife, Mary Anne Trump, who died in
2000.
Trump, who
bashed the Times repeatedly during his presidency as the “failing New York
Times”, noted in the lawsuit that the 2018 article was viewed more online than
any previous Times article and that the New York Times Company’s stock price
jumped 7.4% the week it ran.
The Times’s
story said that Donald Trump and his father avoided gift and inheritance taxes
by methods including setting up a sham corporation and undervaluing assets to
tax authorities.
The Times
says its report was based on more than 100,000 pages of financial documents,
including confidential tax returns from the father and his companies.
Mary
Trump’s book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most
Dangerous Man, debuted in the midst of Donald Trump’s re-election campaign last
year. Donald Trump’s brother, Robert, tried unsuccessfully to have a court
block the book’s publication, citing the 2001 settlement agreement.
Ruling in
Mary Trump’s favor, a judge said the confidentiality clauses, “viewed in the
context of the current Trump family circumstances in 2020, would ‘offend public
policy as a prior restraint on protected speech”.
In the
book, Mary Trump recounted providing the family financial records that underlaid
the Times’ reporting. The book sold more than 1.3m copies in its first week and
soaring to No 1 on the Times’s bestseller list.
In an
interview connected with the release of the book, Mary Trump told ABC’s George
Stephanopoulos she didn’t feel the non-disclosure agreement “mattered one way
or the other because what I have to say is too important”.
POLITICS
09/22/2021 02:58 am ET
MSNBC Hosts Crack Up Over Error Found On First
Page Of Trump Lawsuit
Trump is suing his niece Mary Trump, The New York
Times and three of its reporters.
By
Josephine Harvey
Rachel
Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell had a good chuckle on air Tuesday night after
apparently discovering an error on the first page of former President Donald
Trump’s lawsuit against his niece Mary Trump, The New York Times and three of
its reporters.
The
lawsuit, filed Tuesday in New York, alleges that the Times participated in an
“insidious plot” with Mary Trump to obtain his private tax files, which were
then used in its bombshell reporting about his financial history, The Daily
Beast reported.
As she
signed off her program and handed over to O’Donnell, Maddow said she had just
received a copy of the lawsuit during the commercial break.
“But on
page one, it says, “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,” Maddow
said. “Then it says this: ‘The brazenness of the defendants’ actions cannot be
understated.’”
“That’s
page one of the lawsuit! Cannot be understated. OK. How can you not understate
brazenness?! I’m sorry,” she added.
“He has the
lawyers who think the way he does,” O’Donnell quipped.
Trump’s
lawyers ostensibly meant to say the brazenness of the defendants’ actions could
not be overstated.
Trump is
seeking damages of no less than $100 million. The reporters named in the suit ―
Susanne Craig, David Barstow and Russ Buettner ― won a Pulitzer Prize in 2019
for their reporting on Trump and his businesses’ history of tax dodges. Trump
never revealed his tax returns during his presidency, breaking precedent and
his own campaign pledge.
When asked
about the lawsuit, Mary Trump told the Daily Beast her uncle was acting out of
desperation.
“I think he
is a fucking loser,” she said. “As is always the case with Donald, he’ll try
and change the subject.”
―h/t Mediaite
.jpeg)
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário