Former US President Donald Trump has filed a complaint against his niece Mary Trump and the New York Times, accusing them of a “sneaky plot” to obtain his tax documents and publish a 2018 investigation that won a Pulitzer Prize on a daily basis.
Estimating the damage suffered at $ 100 million, the former president filed a 27-page complaint Tuesday in Dutchess County, New York. The complaint accuses three journalists of the New York Times – Susanne Craig, David Barstow and Russell Buettner – for leading “a vast crusade to obtain confidential tax files from Donald J. Trump”.
An investigation by the tax administration
She accuses the respondents, “motivated by a personal vendetta”, “a devious plot to obtain confidential and highly sensitive documents that they have exploited for their own benefit and used as a means of legitimizing their published work”. The investigation of New York Times, awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2019, spoke of how the former promoter who claims to have made himself alone had built his fortune. She ensured that Donald Trump had in fact received from his father, over several years, the equivalent of current $ 413 million which would have been partly transferred through a shell company, allowing them to evade tax .
Donald Trump had considered the article “dependent” and described its content as “boring” and “déjà vu”. Its publication had nevertheless led to the opening of an investigation by the New York State tax authorities. The Justice Department also ordered the Treasury in August to provide tax returns from the ex-Republican president demanded by a House of Representatives committee, over the six years before he came to power in 2017. Mary Trump revealed to have been the main source of the New York Times, in his book published in 2020 Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man (“Too much and never enough” in the French version).
A nondisclosure agreement
His father, Donald Trump’s older brother, Fred Trump Jr, died in 1981 at the age of 42 from a heart attack his family linked to alcoholism from which he had suffered for more than ten years, having pain lived the family pressure pushing him to work alongside his father in real estate development when he wanted to become a pilot. Donald Trump’s complaint claims that journalists from the New York Times have “relentlessly pursued her niece, Mary L. Trump, and convinced her to take the files out of her lawyer’s office and turn them over to the Times “. “I knocked on Mary Trump’s door. She opened it. I think it’s called journalism, ”journalist Susan Craig tweeted Wednesday morning.
The complaint alleges that Mary Trump violated a non-disclosure agreement signed in 2001 after the estate of Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump Sr. was settled. Mary Trump called her uncle a “loser,” in a statement quoted by NBC . “It’s panic. The walls close and he throws everything he thinks can stick to them on top of it, she added. As always with Donald, he will try and then change the subject ”.
