Finance, Government

Donald Trump Tries To Postpone Irrelevancy The Only Way He Knows How: By Filing A Doomed Lawsuit

A rational actor would see this as a disastrous lawsuit to bring considering it centers around tax and financial documents Trump has fought vociferously to keep secret.

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Donald Trump has been abusing the legal system his entire adult life. Even before he was elected president in 2016, Trump and his businesses had been involved in more than 3,500 lawsuits in federal and state courts. “He sometimes responds to even small disputes with overwhelming legal force,” said a 2016 writeup on Trump’s unprecedented number of legal dustups. That’s a bit of an understatement.

Trump’s legal strategy of flood them with bullshit and spend them into the ground didn’t change after he won the presidency. The only difference was that when he was in office he sometimes got to use taxpayer resources rather than his own to bring in the lawyers, including by getting the Justice Department to represent him in a defamation lawsuit filed by one of his many sexual assault accusers.

After losing the 2020 election, the big crybaby filed, or got his brainwashed followers to file, at least 60 doomed lawsuits seeking to overturn democracy. They all failed. Now some of the lawyers who drafted the lie-littered pleadings for those pro-Trump election lawsuits are facing serious sanctions.

But Trump doesn’t care. What does it matter to him that the people who supported him are getting disbarred and being slapped with money judgments they probably can’t afford to pay? Consequences are for other people, and Trump’s entire career has proven that repeatedly to him.

So, it comes as little surprise that Trump has fallen back on the one thing he knows with a new lawsuit against — wait for it — his own niece. He also sued an old foil, the New York Times, along with three of its reporters, for good measure. Trump is seeking damages “in an amount to be determined at trial, but believed to be no less than One Hundred Million Dollars” (I have no idea why that is capitalized).

The only things more unoriginal than Donald Trump filing an outrageously overvalued lawsuit are the allegations in this particular lawsuit. Trump accuses Mary Trump, his niece, of smuggling records out of her attorney’s office and turning them over to journalists at the insistence of the New York Times, allegedly in violation of the confidentiality agreement Mary Trump signed in 2001 as part of a settlement in litigation over the estate of Frederick Trump (Mary’s grandfather and Trump’s father).

If that sounds familiar, it’s because it is. A lawsuit was filed on behalf of Donald Trump’s brother Robert to try to keep Mary Trump from releasing her memoir, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.” This earlier lawsuit was based on the same 2001 confidentiality agreement. Judge Hal Greenwald already ruled that the vague 2001 confidentiality agreement did not prohibit Mary Trump from releasing the information in her book, and that the publisher of the book was certainly not a party to a confidentiality agreement in probate litigation it was not involved in. Although this new lawsuit is different in some respects, it doesn’t bode well for it to be largely dependent on a confidentiality agreement a judge has already rejected as being inapplicable in curtailing Mary Trump and a similarly situated publisher.

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Mary Trump, reached for comment by the Daily Beast on the new lawsuit, had some kind words for her uncle: “I think he is a fucking loser, and he is going to throw anything against the wall he can.” Well put.

I understand why Donald Trump would want to file this lawsuit — nobody’s coming to his rallies anymore, his endorsement is more likely to sink than help a candidate at this point, and abuse of the legal system has always worked out fine for him before. He thinks he can get some attention here. But it’s truly surprising that he can still get a lawyer on board for something like this after what has been happening recently to Sidney Powell, Lin Wood, Rudy Giuliani, and a number of other lawyers who are now getting their comeuppance for spreading Trump’s lies.

At any rate, a rational actor would see this as a disastrous lawsuit to bring considering it centers around tax and financial documents Trump has fought vociferously to keep secret. You see, lawsuits involve this thing called discovery where the other side gets to force you to turn over all your relevant documents.

Well, I don’t like Trump’s odds here. But maybe he’ll somehow slip away like he always does and leave his new lawyer holding the bag like he’s done numerous times before. He’ll probably stiff her on her legal fees too.

See Also: Shorter Donald Trump Suit: ‘They Stole Confidential Papers That Are Also Totally False, Or Something’

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Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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