Center: Former President Donald Trump appears at RNC in Milwaukee on July 15, 2024 (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images).
An Okeechobee County, Florida, judge on Saturday rejected the joint effort of Pulitzer Prize board members to throw out Donald Trump’s defamation conspiracy lawsuit, finding that a 2022 statement standing by New York Times and Washington Post reporting on special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe was “actionable mixed opinion” and that the former president’s claims were “properly pled.”
The upshot of the ruling, as the New York Times noted in its own report about the Senior 19th Judicial Circuit Judge Robert Pegg’s ruling, is that Trump is one step closer to discovery and a possible deposition grillings of the board members under oath.
The judge has ordered “[a]ll defendants […] to file an answer” to Trump’s amended complaint within 30 days. The motion to dismiss effort was led by Poynter Institute for Media Studies President Neil Brown, the lone Floridian, and was joined by 19 others, including The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, New York Times opinion columnist Carlos Lozada, former Los Angeles Times executive editor Kevin Merida, and the New Yorker’s David Remnick.
When Trump first filed the lawsuit in 2022, he sought to hold the Pulitzer board member defendants liable for the following statement that backed awards for 2017 Russia probe reporting and pointed to independent reviews of the coverage to rebuff his demands to rescind the prizes:
The Pulitzer Prize Board has an established, formal process by which complaints against winning entries are carefully reviewed. In the last three years, the Pulitzer Board has received inquiries, including from former President Donald Trump, about submissions from The New York Times and The Washington Post on Russian interference in the U.S. election and its connections to the Trump campaign—submissions that jointly won the 2018 National Reporting prize.
These inquiries prompted the Pulitzer Board to commission two independent reviews of the work submitted by those organizations to our National Reporting competition. Both reviews were conducted by individuals with no connection to the institutions whose work was under examination, nor any connection to each other. The separate reviews converged in their conclusions: that no passages or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes.
Trump argued that because the Pulitzer Prize is the “pinnacle of American journalistic achievement,” the award “carries very important connotations,” so the board member statement “damaged” his “reputation, profession, and business,” “wrongfully impl[ying] criminal, wrongful, and un-American conduct” on his part by giving authoritative credence to, in his words, “Russia Collusion Hoax” reporting.
Robert Mueller’s investigation did not ultimately allege a 2016 grand conspiracy between the 45th president’s campaign and Russia, but the special counsel’s report did highlight “numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign.”
In the Saturday ruling, the judge noted that Trump alleges the Mueller report “firmly debunked the Russia Collusion Hoax and demonstrated the reporting of the Times and the Post was incorrect and unworthy of the 2018 Pulitzer Prizes,” and that ensuing congressional probes “conducted their own public investigations and similarly found no evidence of collusion between President Trump, the Trump Campaign, and any Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.”
Pegg wrote that because the Pulitzer Prize Board statement Trump is suing over is not “pure opinion,” but rather “actionable mixed opinion” under the relevant law, Trump’s lawsuit can move forward at this stage of the case.
“Defendants cannot claim the statement is pure opinion when they withheld information from their audience that would have provided an adequate factual foundation for a common reader to decide whether to agree or disagree with Defendants’ decision to let 2018 Pulitzer Prizes in National Reporting stand, and whether the awarded reporting had in fact been discredited by facts that emerged from the Mueller Report or the other government investigations that had been made public since the conferral of those prizes,” the order said, before listing “no fewer than seven” implied “undisclosed sets of foundational facts[.]”
Law&Crime sought comment from Paul Richard Berg, the court docket’s attorney of record for the defendants, on the latest development.
Read the court’s ruling here.
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