Former US President Donald Trump, as per reports, filed a $100 million lawsuit against his niece Mary Trump and the New York Times. In the suit, the Republican leader alleged that the two entities conspired to obtain his tax returns for the paper’s Pulitzer-winning story on his undisclosed finances.

The lawsuit has been filed in the Dutchess County, New York state. It says that New York Times reporters Susanne Craig, David Barstow and Russ Buettner conducted ‘an extensive crusade to obtain Donald J. Trump’s confidential tax records’, a NBC report said. 

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“The defendants 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 lawsuit says, alleging they were “motivated by a personal vendetta.”

Craig, Barstow and Buettner received a Pulitzer Prize in 2019. They received the honour, considered one of the highest in the field, for explanatory reporting for their series of stories, which provided the public with an unprecedented look at Trump’s finances.

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Mary Trump said that she released Donald Trump’s tax returns to the Times in her best-selling 2020 book about her uncle ‘Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.” She called her uncle desperate.

“I think he is a 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 he thinks will stick. As is always the case with Donald, he’ll try and change the subject,” she said. The Times said in a statement it plans to challenge the lawsuit.

Mary was the daughter of the eldest Trump brother Fred Trump Jr, who died in 1981 from complications due to alcoholism.

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“The Times’ coverage of Donald Trump’s taxes helped inform citizens through meticulous reporting on a subject of overriding public interest,” Danielle Rhoades Ha, a spokesperson for the New York Times said.

“This lawsuit is an attempt to silence independent news organizations and we plan to vigorously defend against it.”

“I knocked on Mary Trump’s door. She opened it. I think they call that journalism,” Times reporter Craig tweeted early Wednesday.