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EXCLUSIVE: The Trump Organization is demanding the New York Times retract a story it calls ‘libelous’ and claims was deliberately crafted to suggest financial impropriety by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, according to a legal letter obtained by Fox News Digital.
The letter stems from a Times story published this week titled “Trump Cut a Billion-Dollar Mining Deal. His Sons Stand to Profit,” which ties the elder Trump brothers and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s sons to a tungsten deal secured by President Donald Trump with Kazakhstan President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev in September 2025.
“Your June 28 article is deeply misleading and appears deliberately crafted to create the false impression that Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump were involved in, or sought to influence, the decision to award the Kazakhstan tungsten mine project to an affiliate of Cove Capital,” Trump Organization attorney Alan Garten writes in a letter to The Times.
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The letter is addressed to The Times’ editor-in-chief Joseph Kahn, along with the authors of the story, Eric Lipton and Paul Sonne.
“As your own reporting and interviews with those involved all clearly demonstrate, that implication is demonstrably false,” the letter continues.
A spokesperson for The New York Times defended its reporting and addressed the letter by telling Fox News Digital: “The Trump Organization does not deny the main point of our story: That Eric and Donald Jr. have profited from the U.S.-Kazakh tungsten mining agreement.”
“The letter mainly disputes whether the article gave enough prominence to the fact that the brothers were indirect and passive investors — a point that is clearly set out in the story,” NYT’s Executive Director of Media Relations Charlie Stadtlander added in the statement.
Tungsten is a mineral used by the United States to develop military equipment, including missiles and fighter jets. Currently, China, Russia and North Korea have a stranglehold on the resource, and the Trump administration has made it a strategic priority to secure a pipeline to obtain the mineral.
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Kazakhstan is rich in tungsten, and from the outset of his second term in office, Trump sought to make a deal with the Central Asian country to tap into its tungsten supply — even as his own tariff policies have caused price surges and bottlenecks for the import of this metal.
The makings of a deal culminated in a September 2025 meeting at the St. Regis Hotel in New York, where Lutnick hosted Tokayev. Trump joined by phone, and the parties came to a verbal agreement for the United States to procure tungsten, according to The Times.
The Times’ report stems from the Trump brothers’ relationship to an investment firm called Dominari Securities. The brothers invest in some deals made by Dominari and they have a minority share in its parent company, Dominari Holdings Inc.
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A source familiar with the matter explained the details of how the Trump brothers became passive investors in the tungsten mining operation.
An investment fund by Dominari Securities invested in a publicly traded construction company called Skyline Builders in August 2025.
After the verbal September 2025 agreement, Skyline approached Cove Capital, the company that invested in the tungsten mining project, and solicited a merger that would allow Cove Capital affiliate Cove Kaz to go public, the source detailed. The project has been backed by letters of interest from U.S. government financing agencies totaling up to $1.6 billion.
At no point, the source reiterated, did the brothers have any influence over the decision to award the mining contract to Kaz Resources.
This is echoed in the letter to the Times, where it states: “Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump had absolutely no involvement in the award of the Kazakhstan project.”
Furthermore, Cove Capital was not introduced to Skyline Builders until about one month after the September 2025 verbal agreement, according to the legal letter and third-party communications obtained by Fox News Digital.
Those communications also reveal that Cove Capital leadership never spoke to either of the Trump brothers about the financing support before it was executed.
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“Don and Eric exercise no control over either company, played no role in and no knowledge of Cove Capital’s pursuit of the Kazakhstan project, participated in no negotiations relating to the project, and never even discussed the Kazakhstan project with anyone at Skyline, Cove Capital or any of their respective affiliates,” the Trump Organization letter to The Times says.
“Their connection to Cove Capital is therefore remote, indirect and highly attenuated.”
The letter accuses The Times of intentionally misleading readers before it revealed the tenuous relationship between the brothers and the tungsten mining project.
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“Indeed, in a message to my clients sent prior to publication of the story, your team expressly acknowledged that Don and Eric were not ‘actively a part of this deal,'” the letter says.
“Based upon the foregoing, we demand that The New York Times promptly retract or prominently correct the false and misleading impression created by the article and ensure that any future reporting accurately reflects the undisputed facts, including that Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump had no operational role in any of the entities involved, no involvement whatsoever in the Kazakhstan project or its negotiations, and, as a matter of indisputable chronology, could not have influenced the award of the project.”
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The letter ends by expressly reserving all rights and remedies to solve the problem, including potential legal action.
The Trump Organization sounded off on The New York Times in a statement to Fox News Digital, calling the insinuation that the Trump brothers had involvement in the tungsten deal to Cove Capital “categorically false, misleading and libelous.”
The statement addresses the timeline of events and reiterates that the Trump brothers had no control over Cove Capital, its affiliates or Skyline Builders.
“Of course, all of these facts are readily ascertainable and could have easily been verified had anyone from the New York Times or any other publication that republished this supposed story performed even the slightest amount of due diligence before proceeding with such reckless and unfounded assertions,” the statement said.
The White House also weighed in.
“The only special interest guiding the Trump administration’s decision-making is the best interest of the American people,” said White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement to Fox News Digital. “Securing and reshoring America’s critical supply chains has been a top priority for President Trump, and Secretary Lutnick along with the rest of the Administration continue to take historic action to safeguard America’s national and economic security.”
The Commerce Department did not return a request for comment on the deal or allegations that Lutnick’s two sons improperly benefited from the agreement.
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