A spokesperson for The New York Times called the lawsuit «an attempt to silence independent news organizations.»
Former President Donald Trump has filed a $100 million lawsuit against his niece Mary Trump and The New York Times, alleging that she and journalists from the paper “engaged in an insidious plot to obtain confidential and highly-sensitive records” regarding his personal taxes. The Times, which reported on Trump’s tax filings in 2020, “convinced” Mary Trump to “smuggle records out of her attorney’s office and turn them over” to the paper, the lawsuit from Trump alleges. The lawsuit also alleges that the turning over of Trump’s tax records to The Times was “a material breach” of a nondisclosure agreement that Mary Trump was subject to from 2001. The Times “relentlessly sought out Mary Trump and intentionally procured her breach of the Settlement Agreement,” the lawsuit adds. The suit specifically calls out Times journalists Susanne Craig, David Barstow and Russell Buettner for their reporting on Trump’s finances — reporting that earned the trio a Pulitzer Prize in 2019 because it debunked the former president’s “claims of self-made wealth and revealed a business empire riddled with tax dodges.” The Times defended its pursuit of Trump’s tax records, with a spokesperson saying that it “helped inform citizens” on an issue of “overriding public interest.
