Donald Trump has paid $392,000 to The New York Times to cover the legal costs from his failed lawsuit against the newspaper and its journalists over a 2018 investigation into his finances that included confidential tax records, a spokesman for the Times told CNN on Monday.
Trump was ordered to pay the money in January, more than eight months after Judge Robert R. Reed granted the Times’ motion to dismiss the case against it and its journalists, concluding the journalists’ conduct was protected by the New York Constitution.
Among the claims that Trump brought against the Times was the accusation that the journalists were liable for “tortious interference” in how they allegedly sought out his niece and caused her to allegedly breach a 2001 settlement contract with the Trump family, CNN previously reported.
Trump filed his lawsuit in 2021 alleging that the Times and its reporters had hatched an “insidious plot” with Mary Trump—his niece—to get hold of his tax records. The documents that the newspaper obtained informed the prize-winning series of pieces which questioned Donald Trump’s claims of being a self-made billionaire and accused him of having committed “outright fraud.”
In his original complaint, Trump alleged that the reporters and his niece colluded to “smuggle records out of her attorney’s office” and give them to the paper, allegedly breaching a 2001 confidentiality agreement she’d signed. He also claimed the journalists had been “motivated, at least in part, by their actual malice” by reporting on information within his tax records which he’d refused to release.
Alina Habba, Trump’s attorney, claimed in a statement at the time that the reporters “went well beyond the conventional news-gathering techniques permitted by the First Amendment,” adding: “All journalists must be held accountable when they commit civil wrongs.”
