Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally in front of his airplane, March 12, 2016 in Vandalia, Ohio.
Brooks Kraft | Getty Images
Former President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, as part of a $450,000 settlement of a class-action lawsuit by a former campaign aide, agreed to void non-disclosure agreements that hundreds of campaign workers and volunteers had signed as a condition of their work.
The deal, revealed Friday in a court filing, ended a lawsuit filed by former Trump campaign aide Jessica Denson in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.
The settlement effectively invalidates all other NDAs signed by employees of the Trump campaign, potentially opening the door for them to publicly discuss events related to the 2016 race, and to Trump himself, without fear of potentially financially ruinous legal retaliation by him.
Trump, who defeated Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in the 2016 race for the White House, for decades has required people who work for him to sign NDAs. In November, he announced that he will seek the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
“This compromise is in fact a total victory for Jessica Denson, and all 2016 Trump campaign workers,” said David Bowles, a lawyer for Denson.
“The Trump NDA is invalid and unenforceable, and the campaign workers should never have had to live under its shadow,” Bowles said.
Representatives for Trump’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the settlement, which was first reported Friday by the Bloomberg news service.
Lawyers for the campaign had said in a court filing that “the Campaign represents that on its own volition it notified all of these employees, contractors, and volunteers in a signed writing that they are ‘no longer bound by these non-disclosure and non-disparagement provisions.'”
Last April, an arbitrator ordered Trump’s 2016 campaign to pay $1.3 million in legal fees to Omarosa Manigault Newman, the former “Apprentice” star whom the campaign unsuccessfully sued over a book about her…
Read the full article here
