A Florida judge sided with President Donald Trump this week in his defamation lawsuit against members of the Pulitzer Prize Board, who sought to delay the lawsuit until Trump leaves office.
The lawsuit centers on the board's awards to the New York Times and Washington Post for their Russiagate coverage. Last week, Pulitzer board members argued that Trump's participation in the suit "could interfere with his duties as president" and render him unable to "devote his time and energy to the problems and issues facing the nation." Judge Robert Pegg of the 19th circuit court of Okeechobee County, Fla., disagreed, accepting an argument from Trump's attorneys that Trump himself is "in a better position" to determine whether the suit is a distraction.
The ruling marks another victory for Trump in the lawsuit. Last month, Pegg rejected the board’s request to shield internal communications regarding the award. An appeals court, meanwhile, ruled against the board’s motion to dismiss the case over jurisdictional concerns.
Trump sued Pulitzer board members in December 2022 over their prizes, awarded four years earlier, to the Times and Post for a series of stories about Trump’s purported ties to Russia. The board said the stories "dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections." In his lawsuit, Trump said the board "rewarded" the newspapers "for lying to the American public" about the "now-debunked theory" of collusion with Russia.
Federal investigations have since debunked claims that Trump, his 2016 campaign, or members of his first administration colluded with Russia. In his lawsuit, Trump said the stories were "based on manufactured political disinformation paid for by the Clinton Campaign," a reference to the infamous Steele dossier, which accused the Trump campaign of a "well-developed conspiracy of coordination" with the Kremlin.
The case could reveal the internal communications of some of the nation’s most prominent liberal journalists. New Yorker editor David Remnick and Atlantic writer Anne Applebaum serve on the board. Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson chaired the board when it gave its prestigious award to the Times and Post.
One of the jurists who voted for the 2018 prize has peddled debunked conspiracy theories about Trump-Russia collusion. Former McClatchy editor Kristin Roberts, a member of the five-person Pulitzer jury in 2018, defended two controversial reports that same year that former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen met with Kremlin operatives in Prague in 2016. If true, the stories would have corroborated a central claim of the Steele dossier. Roberts accused Cohen of lying after he denied the McClatchy stories. She doubled down on the stories even after Special Counsel Robert Mueller revealed in a report in 2019 that Cohen never traveled to Prague.