Trump Files $100 Million Suit Against Niece, Newspaper For Insidious Plot To Tell The Truth About His Money

The Filing

NEW YORK. In a forceful defense of the free flow of information, former President Donald J. Trump on Tuesday filed a $100 million lawsuit demanding that a newspaper and three of its reporters be punished for the act of publishing information.

The suit, filed in state court in Dutchess County, names his niece Mary L. Trump, The New York Times, and reporters Susanne Craig, David Barstow, and Russell Buettner, the trio whose 18-month investigation into the Trump family finances won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting. According to the complaint, the journalists had engaged in an "insidious plot" and an "extensive crusade" to obtain his tax records, language that legal observers noted is more commonly understood as a description of reporting.

The 2018 investigation found that Mr. Trump had received at least $413 million from his father's real estate empire, much of it through what the reporters documented as dubious tax maneuvers, a finding that complicated his long-standing account of himself as a self-made billionaire. The complaint characterized the effort to establish these facts as the product of "a personal vendetta" and a "desire to gain fame," and sought damages on the theory that the President retained a right to have the figures remain unknown.

Sources within his legal team confirmed that the complaint had been assembled with full awareness that the First Amendment protects the publication of truthful reporting on matters of public concern, and filed regardless. The President, who has on numerous occasions described the press as the enemy of the American people, framed the action as a stand on behalf of accountability.

Legal scholars greeted the filing with the prediction that it would fail, an assessment later borne out. In May 2023, a New York judge dismissed the case against The Times and its reporters on constitutional grounds and ordered Mr. Trump to pay their legal fees, which the court fixed at $392,638.69, thereby requiring the plaintiff to personally finance the newspaper he had set out to punish.

At press time, the President was said to be preparing additional litigation against several other entities that had recently reported things, on the grounds that they had reported them.

Who Benefits

§Donald J. Trump, who turned a damaging, Pulitzer-winning account of his finances into a public performance of grievance and a fresh fundraising hook, regardless of the suit's eventual outcome.
§Mr. Trump's outside attorneys, who billed the hours required to draft and litigate a $100 million complaint that experts identified as doomed from the day it was filed.
§Save America PAC, his post-presidency fundraising vehicle, which gains whenever the President is visibly at war with a major newspaper, win or lose.
§Future litigants and imitators, for whom a wealthy plaintiff suing reporters over accurate, constitutionally protected journalism models the use of the courts to raise the cost of covering the powerful.
§The New York Times, the rare beneficiary that also happens to be the free press, which was ultimately awarded $392,638.69 in legal fees paid personally by the man who tried to bankrupt it.

Sourced to the public record · presented without editorial embellishment