Former President Donald Trump has sued the New York Times, again. The 27-page filing in a Dutchess County, N.Y., court amounts to a presidential fit over his failure to suppress embarrassing information and raises the question: Does Trump have anything better to do?
Defendants in the case include Mary Trump, the president’s niece and author of the book “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,” the New York Times Co. and three Times journalists — Susanne Craig, Russ Buettner and David Barstow — who collaborated on a monster, Pulitzer Prize-winning 2018 investigation of Trump’s tax history. The complaint alleges that the Times propagated 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.” Among other allegations, it charges Mary Trump with breach of contract and the New York Times with tortious interference with contract.
The 2018 blockbuster story blasted to pieces the myth of Trump as a self-made mogul. It also documented sketchy tax practices, including the creation of an entity — All County Building Supply & Maintenance — that directed untaxed gift money to family members. It later emerged that Mary Trump had been the source for key documents in the story. She revealed details about her relationship with the Times in her book, as well as in interviews with news organizations. As detailed in the complaint itself, Mary Trump told the Daily Beast in a podcast that she was “really proud” of having passed the documents along to the Times, though she credited Craig for her journalistic work in digging them up: “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.”
The complaint features a few paragraphs reconstructing Craig’s approach to the story. For example: “Craig persistently and relentlessly sought out Mary Trump in her pursuit of certain documents which she believed to be in Mary Trump’s possession,” reads the complaint. The document alleges that the Times had “actual or constructive knowledge that Mary Trump was not authorized to disclose the Confidential Records to them.”
Those records, says the complaint, are protected under a 2001 estate settlement agreement to which Mary Trump was party.
Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., who represented Mary Trump in beating back an attempt by her uncle Robert Trump to suppress her book, says of this latest litigation: “This is the latest in a long line of frivolous lawsuits by Donald Trump that target truthful speech and important journalism on issues of public concern. It is doomed to failure like the rest of his baseless efforts to chill freedom of speech and of the press.”
For her part, Mary Trump veered a bit from a discussion of the legal merits: “I think he is a f[---]ing loser, and he is going to throw anything against the wall he can,” she told the Daily Beast. “It’s desperation. The walls are closing in and he is throwing anything against the wall that will stick. As is always the case with Donald, he’ll try and change the subject.”
Tortious interference claims against news organizations have a dubious history. Ronan Farrow, who reported sexual assault and rape allegations against movie producer Harvey Weinstein, alleged that the mogul’s lawyers cited tortious interference as they hammered NBC News for investigating the movie producer’s actions — a process that Farrow outlined in “Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators.” CBS News also wrestled with the prospect of just such a claim as it deliberated over the allegations of a tobacco industry whistleblower in the 1990s.
Jeffrey J. Pyle, a lawyer with Prince Lobel Tye LLP, says that some courts have recognized that First Amendment newsgathering imperatives override “any possibility of showing that a news organization acted improperly in a tortious interference claim.” The protection, however, should be more wide-ranging and explicit, he argues.
“In my view, the courts should recognize an absolute First Amendment privilege against this kind of liability,” writes Pyle in an email. “Trump is literally suing the Times for publishing truthful, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism about a matter of profound public concern.”
