Trump’s 2016 campaign to pay $450,000 in NDA lawsuit settlement

A member of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign will receive up to $25,000 in a legal settlement if a judge overseeing his lawsuit against the former president’s first White House bid approves the OK.

The court case itself will also have far greater implications beyond just a monetary penalty for Mr Trump as well.

The Trump campaign had proposed the settlement with Jessica Denson, who accused another campaign staffer of sexually harassing her and being generally abusive, The New York Times first reported this weekend. It’s not final yet, but members of his legal team are celebrating their victory.

“We believe this NDA was totally unreasonable from the start,” attorney David K. Bowles told the publication. “No lawyer should ever have written it, and no campaign worker should ever have been coerced into signing it. We believe the outcome of the NDA is a triumph for free speech, for democracy and for Jessica Denson in particular, and we are very proud of our accomplishment tonight.

Journalists hungry for stories about Mr. Trump’s successful presidential bid are likely to celebrate, too, as the settlement will free up other staffers bound by the same nondisclosure agreements to speak publicly about their experiences.

The use of such agreements has exploded in the political world in recent years; Last week, newly elected Congressman George Santos, who is currently at the center of a slew of scandals thanks to his numerous lies about his background, was heard over a leaked audio joke that members of his staff were under a similar agreement.

Mr. Trump’s two chaotic campaigns for the presidency – not to mention his stint in the White House itself – have generated unprecedented buzz in the media. Many journalists were eager to get an inside look at the political machine the business magnate had seemingly built out of nowhere to propel him to power.

This same media buzz has often come in the form of embarrassing or negative media coverage of Mr. Trump’s campaign, administration and personal life, prompting Mr. Trump to resent leaks in the media in public and in private for much of his presidency.

In a now-famous moment after just a month into his presidency, Mr. Trump insisted that reporters were writing “fake news” about his administration while admitting that information leaked by his staff to the press was indeed ” real”. .

“The leaks are absolutely real, the news is fake, because a lot of the news is fake,” he complained to reporters during a combative press conference.

More recently, the ex-president demanded that a policy journalist who exposed the story of a Supreme Court leaked draft to be sent to prison, a claim that has been denounced by press freedom monitors.