Donald Trump’s niece Mary admits leaking financial documents to New York Times

In a bitter book about Donald Trump, Mary Trump admits she decided to share financial documents to damage him.

Mary Trump has written a blistering book about her uncle Donald Trump. Picture: AFP.

Mary L. Trump, Donald Trump’s niece, leaked critical financial documents about the Trump family to the New York Times in 2017 in an effort to damage the president, she wrote in a coming book that tells a bitter story about the president’s upbringing and family dynamics.

In her memoir, Ms. Trump said she decided to share the documents — some related to a decades-old dispute within the family over her grandfather’s estate — because of her concerns regarding the policies of the president.

“I had to take Donald down,” Ms. Trump wrote in Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created The World’s Most Dangerous Man, a copy of which was obtained by The Wall Street Journal. The book will be published on July 14 by Simon & Schuster, the book-publishing arm of ViacomCBS Inc.

“I grabbed copies of my grandfather’s wills, floppy disks with all of the depositions from the lawsuit, and some of my grandfather’s bank records — all of which I was legally entitled to as part of the lawsuit — and stuffed them into my bags,” she wrote.

Mary Trump’s book about her uncle Donald. Picture: AP.

Mary Trump. Picture: AP.

Ms. Trump gave them to a reporter for the Times, who in turn handed her “a burner phone so we could communicate more securely going forward. We weren’t taking any chances.” Ms. Trump wrote that she later provided additional documents to Times reporters.

That information contributed to a lengthy article that the Times published in October 2018 providing an account of the Trump family’s business activities.

The Times won a 2019 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting for “an exhaustive 18-month investigation of President Donald Trump’s finances that debunked his claims of self-made wealth and revealed a business empire riddled with tax dodges,” according to the citation.

Ms. Trump is the daughter of the late Frederick Trump Jr., the oldest son of real-estate magnate Fred Trump and the brother of Donald Trump and three other siblings. Fred Trump died in 1999, and his surviving spouse, Mary Anne Trump, in 2000.

In her memoir, Ms. Trump describes a complex set of relationships between the elder Fred Trump and his sons. She recalled the father shouting at Fred Trump Jr. in front of a group of employees: “Donald is worth ten of you.” Donald Trump was in high school at the time, she wrote.

“Mary Trump and her book’s publisher may claim to be acting in the public interest, but this book is clearly in the author’s own financial self-interest,” White House spokeswoman Sarah Matthews said Tuesday. “President Trump has been in office for over three years working on behalf of the American people — why speak out now?”

The Trump siblings: From left Robert, Elizabeth, Fred Jr, Donald and Maryanne.

Ms. Matthews said the president describes his relationship with his father as “warm” and “loving.”

Ms. Trump cast a harsh light on the Trump family’s relationship with her father. Ms. Trump wrote that when her father suffered a heart attack at age 42 after years of drinking and smoking, nobody from the family accompanied him to the hospital. Donald Trump, she wrote, went to the movies. Fred Trump Jr. died that evening.

Senior White House adviser Kellyanne Conway told reporters Tuesday the president is always privately complimentary of his brother and was strongly affected by his death.

Mr. Trump has often invoked his brother’s alcoholism to explain why he doesn’t drink. “He would constantly tell me, don’t drink. … He would say it over and over and over again,” the president said in 2017.

Ms. Trump, who has a doctorate in clinical psychology, wrote that President Trump’s “pathologies are so complex and his behaviours so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of psychological and neuropsychological tests that he’ll never sit for.”

Ms. Conway suggested Tuesday that the president’s niece was out of her depth. “He’s not her patient, he’s her uncle,” she said.

In the book, Ms. Trump says President Trump cheated on a crucial college entrance test. He hired a “smart kid with a reputation for being a good test taker, to take his SATs for him,” she wrote. “That was much easier to pull off in the days before photo IDs and computerised records. Donald, who never lacked for funds, paid his buddy well.”

Ms. Matthews, the White House spokeswoman, said: “The absurd SAT allegation is completely false.”

Mr. Trump has often bragged about attending University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school program as an undergraduate, calling the school “super genius stuff.”

Last year, longtime Trump lawyer Michael Cohen testified before Congress that Mr. Trump had directed him to threaten the president’s high school, colleges and the College Board not to release his grades or SAT scores. Mr. Cohen showed the committee copies of the letter he said he sent at the president’s direction.

A spokesman for Fordham University, which Mr. Trump attended for two years before transferring to Wharton, at the time confirmed that a Trump aide had called during the 2016 campaign to confirm the university wouldn’t release any of his records.

Mr. Cohen is serving a three-year sentence in home confinement after pleading guilty to charges including campaign-finance violations.

Earlier this month, President Trump’s brother Robert S. Trump filed a lawsuit in Dutchess County, N.Y., asking the court to block Simon & Schuster from releasing Ms. Trump’s memoir. He alleged the book included details that, if published, would violate a confidentiality agreement signed by Ms. Trump years ago. The contract had been part of the financial settlement that stemmed from the familial inheritance dispute.

A New York judge issued a temporary injunction against Ms. Trump and the publisher. At the time, Simon & Schuster said 75,000 copies of the book had already been printed and thousands had been shipped to sellers.

But on Friday, an appellate judge reversed course in a late-night decision and overturned the restraining order against the company.

“Unlike Ms. Trump, S & S has not agreed to surrender or relinquish any of its First Amendment rights,” Justice Alan D. Scheinkman wrote in the six-page order. He noted that the company wasn’t acting as an agent of Ms. Trump, who is scheduled to appear in the Dutchess County court later this week for additional arguments on whether the temporary injunction against her should continue.

The legal Ping-Pong match intensified Monday, when Simon & Schuster announced plans to move up the book’s release day to July 14.

The Wall St Journal