President Donald Trump on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against the New York Times and his niece, Mary Trump, for “their collective efforts in tortiously breaching and/or interfering with his contractual rights and otherwise maliciously conspiring against him,” referring to a 2018 report about his tax records.
“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 states. “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 $100 million suit, filed in New York’s Dutchess County, claims that three reporters with the New York Times conspired with Mary Trump to “smuggle” confidential records from her attorney’s office and hand them over to The Times in an attempt to “capitalize” on those classified records.
New York Times reporters Susanne Craig, David Barstow, and Russell Buettner were all named in the suit for their alleged efforts in publishing Trump’s confidential tax records in 2018.
At the time of the report, The Times claimed to have obtained the classified records by an anonymous individual but it was later revealed in Mary Trump’s book Too Much And Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, that Mary Trump was the primary source for the report, according to the Daily Wire.
The lawsuit alleges that the family feud between the Trumps surrounds a legal battle over the estate of Fred Trump, Donald Trump’s father and Mary’s grandfather, who passed away in 1999. Mary Trump, along with her attorneys, came into possession of the “40,000 pages of highly sensitive, proprietary, private and confidential documents,” pertaining to Donald Trump and other family members.