Donald Trump speaks at the annual Road to Majority conference in Washington, DC, June 22, 2024. (Allison Bailey/NurPhoto via AP)
The Pulitzer Prize board aims to turn the tables on Donald Trump in a defamation lawsuit by taking a page – or, rather, at least several dozen pages – from the president’s own playbook.
In a Monday filing, the board moved to pause proceedings in the long-running case until the 47th president’s term in office is complete.
The motion to stay premised on Trump being president of the United States quickly cites two sections of the U.S. Constitution right out of the gate, the Supremacy Clause and the Take Care clause – along with long-standing constitutional case law interpreting those cited sections.
“[I]t would now raise constitutional concerns for this court – or any other state court – to exercise ‘direct control’ over Plaintiff during his presidency,” the board’s motion reads.
The rub here is quickly made obvious: Trump himself has, on several occasions, cited those same sections of the Constitution in efforts to pump the brakes on civil lawsuits in which he is the named defendant.
Now, the Pulitzer Prize board is endorsing the logic of such pauses – and applying the logic to a civil lawsuit in which Trump is the plaintiff.
“[I]n his first term, and again just last week, Plaintiff asked other state courts for the same relief that Defendants seek here, and on exactly the same basis,” the board’s motion continues.
Trump sued the board for defamation in December 2022, after several months of legal demands and threats to file such a lawsuit. The nexus of the lawsuit is the 2018 award for National Reporting which was co-granted to The Washington Post and The New York Times for their reporting on the “Russiagate” scandal. During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, some Russian nationals interfered on Trump’s behalf – sparking a yearslong search for evidence that Trump’s campaign was engaged in a conspiracy with the Russian government. Those fears did not pan out.
While special counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiries ultimately found no evidence of collusion with the Russian Federation, the two media companies were awarded for what the Pulitzer Prize board referred to as “deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.”
Unfortunately for the board, that was not all they said about the matter – ultimately responding publicly to Trump’s lawyer letters.
In 2022, the board defended its award with a lengthy statement that stood by the outlets’ reporting. In July 2024, a judge in Okeechobee County, Florida, ruled that the board’s statement was “actionable mixed opinion” and that Trump’s claims were “properly pled.”
Now, the board is hoping to use Trump’s own – and largely successful – record of employing dilatory tactics to their own benefit.
The motion cites a since-dropped lawsuit against Trump filed by Summer Zervos, a former contestant on The Apprentice, as well as an extant lawsuit filed by Trump Media co-founders against Trump over ownership interests in Truth Social.
From the filing, at length:
Specifically, in his first term Plaintiff argued that if a case pending against him in New York state court was not “temporarily stayed, it will disrupt and impair [his] ability to discharge his Article II responsibilities,” and he declared that “the effective administration of our nation provides a compelling justification to stay [the] action.” Likewise, just days ago, Plaintiff reiterated these points in a case against him in Delaware state court, arguing that, because litigation would unconstitutionally interfere with his presidential duties, “[c]ommonsense favors a stay of this case until the end of the President’s term,” so that “President Trump can devote his time and energies to America’s problems.”
In each of those cases, the Pulitzer board points out, Trump argued in favor of stays that lasted for the entirety of his time in office because of salient constitutional concerns about state courts and the U.S. presidency.
The motion argues that entering a stay would not prejudice Trump but, rather, denying the defendants’ requested relief would, in fact, “ultimately be to Plaintiff’s detriment” by raising such a host of constitutional concerns. And, the motion goes on, this could open the floodgates “because it would estop [Trump] from seeking to stay other litigation that may arise against him in state courts during his presidency.”
Here is the heart of the matter as the defendants see it:
Now that Plaintiff has begun his second term as President, this case creates the same constitutional conflicts that Plaintiff identified in both Zervos and United Atlantic Ventures. If this case proceeds into discovery, Defendants will be obligated to exercise their rights under the Florida Rules of Civil Procedure to demand that Plaintiff produce documents, respond to requests for admission, provide sworn answers to written interrogatories, and testify under oath by deposition on oral examination. Each form of discovery will subject Plaintiff to this Court’s “immediate and ever-present power to issue an order requiring him to take some action” – a power that, according to Plaintiff, the Constitution now forbids this Court from even wielding over him, let alone actually exercising.
The Pulitzer board hopes the Florida judge overseeing the case will be attuned to those concerns and rid the case of the specter of any potential conflicts by issuing a four-year pause.
“According to Plaintiff, ‘[t]he appropriate answer’ to these constitutional concerns ‘is to postpone’ such a state court case ‘until [the President] is no longer in office,”” the motion reads. “Defendants agree. To avoid such constitutional conflicts, the Court should stay this case until Plaintiff’s term in office has concluded.”
“Just as he once argued,” the Pulitzer board says, the underlying case will eventually go to court – but it should be put on ice for now.
The Pulitzer Prize Board’s motion can be read in full here.
