A New York state judge on Thursday ordered Donald Trump to pay $392,638.69 in legal fees for The New York Times and three Times writers stemming from a “frivolous” 2021 lawsuit that had already been dismissed.
“This just happened: A New York State judge has ordered Donald Trump to pay The New York Times $392,638.69 for legal fees connected to a frivolous lawsuit he brought against the paper, two of my colleagues and me,” Susanne Craig tweeted on Friday.
Craig won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting in 2019 for her story in the Times that revealed that Trump’s millions, supposedly earned by through his various businesses, were actually inherited from his father. The next year, she reported that Trump paid only $750 federal income tax in 2016 and did not pay any federal taxes in 10 of the previous 15 years.
This just happened: A New York State judge has ordered Donald Trump to pay The New York Times $392,638.69 for legal fees connected to a frivolous lawsuit he brought against the paper, two of my colleagues and me.
https://t.co/17TJesOEn5
— Susanne Craig (@susannecraig) January 12, 2024
Trump also sued the newspaper, senior writer David Barstow, investigative Russell Buettner, various John Does and “ABC Corporations 1 through 10.” The suit also named the former president’s niece Mary L. Trump, who wrote the scathing 2020 anti-Trump book “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.”
The case, which Trump filed in 2021, was dismissed on May 3, 2023. Trump accused the paper of being part of an “insidious plot” with his estranged niece to improperly obtain his confidential tax records.
On Friday, a federal judge ruled in Trump’s favor by dismissing a New York case brought by investors in 2018 who said they’d been fooled into backing the “Iris 5000” video phone because of the “Celebrity Apprentice” hosts’s endorsement, the Daily Beast reported.
U.S. District Judge Lorna G. Schofield decided that the case was no longer a federal one and would be referred back to the individual states, California, Maryland and Pennsylvania, where the plaintiffs reside. “Ordered that plaintiff’s claims are dismissed without prejudice to filing in state court,” she wrote in her order.
Trump is due back in court in New York City on Tuesday for his second rape defamation trial.
The post Donald Trump Ordered to Pay New York Times $400,000 for Frivolous Lawsuit appeared first on TheWrap.
