Well, this might come as news to the authors of a New York Times piece about two women who claimed they were groped by Donald Trump.
“They are really, really bad people,” Trump said about the Times reporters during a campaign rally today (Oct. 14) in Greensboro, North Carolina. “They’re corporate lobbyists for Carlos Slim and foreign corporations.”
Slim, a telecom tycoon, owns a 17% stake in The New York Times. His family is the newspaper company’s largest single investor. And, according to Trump, the Mexican billionaire has an interest in helping the campaign of Democrat Hillary Clinton, as evidenced by Slim’s connections to the Clinton Foundation.
“We’re going to let foreign corporations and their CEOs decide the outcomes of the—you just can’t do this. We can’t let this happen. We are not going to let it happen where they decide the outcome of our elections,” Trump said.
Earlier this week, the Times received a letter from the candidate’s lawyers threatening to sue the paper for libel if it didn’t retract its article about the two alleged victims, one of whom said she was groped by Trump three decades ago while seated next to him on a flight, and other of whom worked in Trump Tower in Manhattan and said she was forcibly kissed by Trump in 2005. The Times declined to issue the retraction, saying “nothing in our article has had the slightest effect on the reputation that Mr. Trump, through his own words and actions, has already created for himself.”
New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. waived off the idea of a conspiracy, saying Slim doesn’t influence the paper’s reporting.
Meanwhile, a representative for Slim told CNBC, ”We never get involved in politics in Mexico, much less in the United States.”