A New York judge dismissed Donald Trump's 2021 lawsuit against The New York Times over its reporting on his tax records and ordered the former president to pay all attorneys' fees and legal expenses incurred by the news outlet and its journalists.
New York County Supreme Court Justice Robert R. Reed ruled on Wednesday that Trump's claims against the paper and three of its journalists, regarding their Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation of his undisclosed finances in 2018, did not hold up under constitutional law.
"Courts have long recognized that reporters are entitled to engage in legal and ordinary newsgathering activities without fear of tort liability — as these actions are at the very core of protected First Amendment activity," Reed wrote in his ruling.
The judge further ruled that Trump had failed to show any "tortious interference" when a Times journalist "provided his niece with a burner phone to communicate about the records," according to The Daily Beast.
Trump filed the $100 million lawsuit in 2021 against The Times, three journalists from the outlet (David Barstow, Russell Buettner and Susanne Craig) and his estranged niece Mary Trump. While Mary Trump "has also filed a motion to dismiss," a "ruling has not yet been rendered," per NBC News.
The suit alleged that the reporters and Trump's niece had "engaged in 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."
The 2018 Pulitzer Prize-winning article published by The Times probed Trump's claims that he was "a self-made billionaire," leveraging information provided by his niece. The investigation "found that he received at least $413 million in today's dollars from his father's real estate empire, much of it through tax dodges in the 1990s."
"The New York Times is pleased with the judge's decision today," Charlie Stadtlander, a spokesperson for The Times, told The Guardian. "It is an important precedent reaffirming that the press is protected when it engages in routine newsgathering to obtain information of vital importance to the public."
This isn't the first time that the former president has sued a news outlet. He previously sued CNN, accusing the network of playing a part in a "campaign of dissuasion in the form of libel and slander against" him, seeking $475 million in punitive damages.
Then his campaign sued The Times in 2019 over an op-ed suggesting a "quid pro quo" with Russian officials. Similarly, he went after The Washington Post for libel over an opinion piece that linked his campaign to Russian electoral interference. Both cases were dismissed.
After her uncle's lawsuit was filed in September 2021, Mary Trump told The Daily Beast: "I think he is a f**king loser, and he is going to throw anything against the wall he can. 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."
Following a recent appearance on "Salon Talks," Dean Obeidallah wrote that Mary Trump "understands what Donald Trump is capable of, especially now that he has finally been charged with crimes."
"Every day he is allowed to roam free, he gets more dangerous . . . Because he will reveal to people who for some bizarre reason don't believe it yet that he's capable of anything, that there is no bottom and there is nothing at which he will stop either to get his way," Mary Trump told Obeidallah.
