Trump settles lawsuit with his niece over his tax records
The president claimed his now-61-year-old niece, Mary Trump, “smuggled” his financial records out of an attorney’s office in violation of a decades-old estate settlement.
MANHATTAN (CN) — President Donald Trump on Tuesday settled a $100 million lawsuit he brought against his own niece Mary Trump, whom he claimed conspired with reporters to publicize his tax records.
“The parties are pleased to report that they have reached a settlement and anticipate being able to stipulate to the dismissal of this action with prejudice in the ensuing weeks, following completion of certain conditions precedent,” the parties wrote in a joint filing, docketed Tuesday.
The terms of the settlement remain unclear. Mary Trump didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did her lawyers. The White House deferred to the president’s personal lawyers, who also didn’t respond to inquiries on Tuesday.
Donald Trump initially brought the suit in 2021 after he was ousted from the White House following his election loss to Joe Biden. He claimed that Mary Trump, a fervent critic of her uncle, engaged in an “insidious plot” with a trio of New York Times reporters to get their hands on the records for a Pulitzer Prize-winning 2018 probe into his finances.
According to the president in his lawsuit, Mary Trump “smuggled” his tax records out of her attorney’s office after gaining access to them via a 2001 agreement over the estate of Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump. In doing so, Mary Trump purportedly violated a nondisclosure and confidentiality agreement in that estate settlement.
Donald Trump initially sued the three Times journalists — Susanne Craig, David Barstow and Russell Buettner — alongside his niece. But those claims were tossed by a state judge in 2023 and he was ordered to pay nearly $400,000 in legal fees to The New York Times.
Mary Trump had sought to ice the lawsuit after Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election, arguing to a New York judge that there is an “unmistakable imbalance of power” between the parties. She also argued pausing the case would be best for the president, too, as he would be able to focus on the obligations of his office “without distraction.”
New York Supreme Court Justice Robert Reed disagreed, allowing the lawsuit to move forward.
The settlement comes after Mary Trump claimed to have issues getting her uncle to sit for a deposition, effectively stalling the case. Last summer, her lawyers accused the president of simply dragging his feet to prolong the case.
As of the latest status conference on May 19, the deposition still had not occurred. But Trump’s lawyer Michael Madaio said at the time that the parties were “close” to a resolution.
The 2018 New York Times investigation into Donald Trump’s finances scrutinized the president’s longstanding claims of being a self-made billionaire by disclosing how he dodged taxes and received hundreds of millions of dollars from his father throughout his lifetime.
At the time, the paper attributed the tax records to a confidential source. But Mary Trump later revealed in her 2020 book — titled “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man” — that she had been the one to procure the files.
Donald Trump sued his niece over that, too, in what was ultimately a failed effort to prevent her from publishing the tell-all.
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