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Trump Sues NYT and Mary Trump for ‘Insidious Plot’ to Expose His Taxes: What’s He Hiding?

When the New York Times published its massive expose on Trump’s back taxes, the Times was perhaps one of a dozen newspapers on earth with the money and resources to compile such records into a coherent story, maybe The Guardian, La Monde, the Toronto Globe and Mail, Der Spiegel, the list isn’t long, and the New York Times did what the New York Times does, published one of the most important stories of the last five to ten years. Of course, they had the ultimate source, one that could assist them in going through those records, Mary Trump. It was a massive and earth-shattering report.

Or it should have been. In any other presidency, direct evidence all but proving tax evasion would be plenty to bring down a president. During the Trump presidency, it was called “Tuesday.”

Trump has always been the aluminum foil crime boss, nothing sticks. There are never consequences. In large part, he’s managed to get away with it due to his insistence upon Non-Disclosure agreements, a staple throughout his life. More than even money, Donald Trump needs secrecy. Without secrecy, he wouldn’t have any money.

Thus it is that Trump is suing those who he believes violated his inalienable right to secretly do whatever he wants. He sued Mary Trump and the New York Times. Per the Daily Beast [1]:

The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in Dutchess County, New York, by attorney Alina Habba, alleges that the newspaper convinced Mary Trump to “smuggle records out of her attorney’s office and turn them over to The Times” despite her having signed a confidentiality agreement in 2001 after settling a contentious legal battle over the will of Frederick Trump, Donald’s father and Mary’s grandfather.

For reasons that most of humanity could never understand, Trump made it a mission to leave his sister-in-law and nieces with nothing (relative to what the rest of the family received). Trump needed an NDA signed about the deal so that the public never knew how awful a person he had been in that dispute. He got one, but a vague one.

While Times reporters David Barstow, Susanne Craig, and Russ Buettner—who won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting in 2019 for what they revealed about the taxes the former president had refused to disclose [2], and how little he’d paid in federal income taxes—also weren’t party to the confidentiality agreement Mary Trump had signed in 2001, the former president’s new suit claims they were “directly responsible,” citing her interview with Molly Jong-Fast on The Daily Beast’s The New Abnormal podcast [3] while claiming the reporters were “motivated, at least in part, by their actual malice” toward Trump:

Molly Jong-Fast: You were ultimately the source for the tax story.

Mary Trump: Yeah, um, I’m actually really proud of that. But I have to be honest with you, I didn’t even remember I had [the Confidential Records]. It’s entirely down to the brilliant Susanne Craig for, one, reminding me that I had them and, two, so effectively and tenaciously trying to convince—I mean it took her months before I did—so it’s entirely down to her.

Yes, well, good f’ing luck proving actual malice against the New York Times reporters and given that a judge has already ruled in Robert Trump’s case that the NDA is too vague, one can expect the same result in this case. Filing the lawsuit seems to be as much about punishment as anything, forcing both parties to hire attorneys.

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[email protected] and on Twitter @JasonMiciak