In an interview with Rachel Maddow, President Trump’s niece Dr. Mary L. Trump stated that she “had no idea” how explosive the 40,000 pages of financial information that she handed over to the New York Times was when she gave the information to reporters.
Dr. Trump also said that her aunts and uncles failed to uphold the standards of a trustee of her financial assets, a fiduciary duty of trustee..
The brilliance of that reporting, the analysis [the New York Times team] did cannot be overstated,” Dr. Trump said. “They were anodyne documents, but they were also incredibly complex, and the financial devices that my family used to cover up certain things that they were doing were not easily decipherable.”
“I was utterly blown away, as, y’know, objectively by the story but also personally to find out what had happened within the family that I didn’t understand at the time,” Dr. Trump continued. “And also considering, it wasn’t just, y’know, people in my family did these things that they shouldn’t have done.
“These were my aunts and uncles who happened to be my trustees, and clearly I didn’t benefit by the role that they were supposed to play in protecting my financial interests when I was younger.”
Trustees of estates and financial matters are supposed to manage the assets with which they are entrusted to the benefit of beneficiary of the portfolio, not for their own personal enrichment.
The New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on Trump family finances. Mary Trump’s aunt, Maryanne Trump Barry, retired from being a federal judge on the Third Circuit Court to avoid an ethics investigation into the allegations set forth in the reporting about financial schemes undertaken by the Trump family to avoid paying taxes.