Trump wins round in libel suit against Pulitzer Prize Board over Russia stories

Donald Trump scored a significant court win Saturday as a state judge in Florida turned down attempts by the Pulitzer Prize Board to toss out a libel lawsuit Trump filed in 2022 relating to a series of reports in the New York Times and Washington Post on the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.

In a 14-page ruling issued Saturday, Senior Judge Robert Pegg turned down arguments from the prominent journalism awards panel that their decision to bestow the national reporting prize on the staffs of the two newspapers in 2018 amounted to a statement of “pure opinion” rather than fact.

The libel suit does not hinge directly on the articles the Times and Post published about the Trump campaign’s links to Russia or on the decision to award the Pulitzer to the newspapers.

Instead, the case focuses on the board’s decision in 2022 to publicly reaffirm those awards despite repeated complaints by Trump that the the stories contained numerous falsehoods and were undermined by the findings of special counsel Robert Mueller’s two-year investigation into those issues.

Trump appears to have zeroed in on the board’s 2022 statement about the reviews it ordered of the earlier prizes because Florida law has a two-year statute of limitations for defamation cases.

In a post on his Trump Social platform on Saturday, Trump’s touted Pegg’s ruling, saying the judge “issued a Powerful Decision totally and completely DENYING the Pulitzer Prize Board’s desperate attempt to dismiss my ironclad Defamation Lawsuit against them for awarding the once respected Pulitzer Prizes to Fake News Stories about the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax by The Failing New York Times and The Washington Compost.”

Trump said Pegg stated that Mueller’s report on his probe “debunked” the Times and Post reports, but the judge’s decision actually says that Trump claimed in the suit that the special prosecutor’s work demonstrated that the newspapers’ reporting was incorrect.

However, Pegg’s ruling does suggest he believes the Pulitzer Board’s review of Trump’s complaint was shoddy. He noted that the group’s statement reaffirming the awards failed to “address if or how the ‘independent reviewers’ were able to verify the anonymous sources that appear throughout the Awarded Articles and were critical to advancing the larger Russia Collusion Hoax narrative.”

“Instead, the reader is left to wonder if that was even attempted,” wrote Pegg, who retired in 2018, but was later named as a senior judge to help courts cope with crowded dockets.

Mueller’s report, released in March 2019, indicated that the investigation he conducted “did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

In another decision Saturday, Pegg dismissed a bid by most of the defendants in the case to be dismissed from the case on grounds that they lack sufficient ties to Florida for the courts there to have jurisdiction over them.

The rulings mean Trump’s suit will likely continue into a discovery phase, where the former president’s lawyers will be able to question Pulitzer board members about discussions related to the awards to the Times and Post. Trump’s attorneys are also expected to seek to expose who conducted the two reviews the board said it commissioned that reaffirmed the accuracy of the newspapers’ work.

Pulitzer officials and their attorneys did not immediately respond to requests late Saturday for comment on the decisions. The Philadelphia-based law firm representing the awards panel members, Ballard Spahr, also represents POLITICO and other news outlets in various matters.

Trump’s suit names as defendants the board members and administrative staff of the Pulitzers at the time the 2018 prizes were awarded. He filed the case in December 2022 in Okeechobee County, which is in the central portion of the state, about 60 miles northwest of Trump’s home in Palm Beach.

In Trump’s social media post about the case, he echoed his previous calls for changes to the nation’s libel laws, calling the landmark New York Times v. Sullivan precedent “deeply outdated” and “from a bygone Era, before the Media went Radical and Woke, as they suffer from a terminal case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.”