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In 2018, multiple current and former White House employees confirmed the administration’s use of White House NDAs. Former Press Secretary Sarah Sanders stated—inaccurately—that “every administration prior to the Trump administration has had NDAs” and that “despite contrary opinion, it’s actually very normal.”
18 Former White House counselor Kellyanne Conway argued that White House employees signed NDAs because they were needed to ensure privacy.
President Trump and the Trump Organization have utilized NDAs as standard practice for decades. President Trump has publicly confirmed his use of NDAs in business proceedings, boasting that his agreements were “so airtight” that “[he] never had a problem” with unauthorized disclosures.
95 He has routinely required employees and associates to sign NDAs prohibiting them from revealing information about the Trump Organization.
96 These NDAs have typically included a non-disparagement clause, designed to prevent the employee from disclosing any disparaging secrets about Trump or his family.
97 One such agreement prohibits employees indefinitely from disclosing information “of a private, proprietary or confidential nature or that Mr. Trump insists remain private or confidential.”
98 Those bound by the agreement must return or destroy any confidential information in their possession upon Trump’s request.
99
President Trump has aggressively enforced his private NDAs through litigation. In 2013, his Miss Universe pageant sued a former contestant after she claimed the pageant was rigged.
100 The organization won a $5 million judgment based on a non-disparagement provision in the contestant’s contract that prohibited any conduct that would bring “public disrepute, ridicule, contempt or scandal or might otherwise reflect unfavorably” on President Trump and associated businesses.
101 In 1996, President Trump brought an unsuccessful suit against Barbara Corcoran, a New York businesswoman, who he claimed breached a confidentiality agreement.
102
President Trump has likewise liberally employed and enforced NDAs in his personal life. One prominent example is the lawsuit he brought in 1992 against his ex-wife, Ivana Trump, for allegedly breaching the nondisclosure portion of their divorce documents.
103 He argued that her romance novel,
For Love Alone, was based on the couple’s marriage and violated the divorce settlement NDA.
104 The suit was settled out of court.
105 In 2018, Stephanie Clifford publicly challenged the validity of an NDA (signed days before the 2016 election) intended to keep secret her alleged extramarital affair with President Trump.
106 The agreement included a financial penalty of $1 million for each breach of its terms.
107 Ultimately, the president agreed not to enforce the agreement following intense public scrutiny.
108 In 2019, during an unplanned trip to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, President Trump required doctors and staff to sign NDAs before they could be involved in his treatment.
109
And just this summer, the president attempted to enforce an NDA against his niece, Mary Trump, to prevent publication of a damaging family memoir.
110 Mary Trump signed the agreement as part of a 2001 inheritance settlement, but the president was unable to prevent the book from being published.
111 In an interview, Mary Trump accused the president of routinely using NDAs as swords to silence critics, leaning on “his power, his position and his money and his apparently endless supply of lawyers to run out the clock. Or just to outspend people who can’t afford it.”
112 She described his NDAs as “a weapon to advance his own agenda.”