The Pulitzer Prize board dropped its opposition this week to President Donald Trump’s efforts to obtain a confidential report that defended the board’s awards to the New York Times and Washington Post for their coverage of Russiagate.
The internal report, authored by former Reuters editor in chief Stephen Adler, is key to Trump’s lawsuit against the board over its 2018 award to the newspapers for a series of stories that "dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections" to Trump, as the board originally put it. The board referred to Adler’s review—though without identifying him—in a July 2022 statement that reaffirmed its award four years earlier to the Times and Post and said none of the stories had been "discredited."
On Jan. 23, Trump's attorneys proposed a subpoena of Adler, requesting all documents and communications related to his report. Pulitzer board members filed an objection one week later, arguing that the request should be directed to them rather than Adler, an outside party, and that Adler should have the ability to designate certain information as "confidential."
The Florida judge overseeing the case, however, denied that confidentiality request last week, handing Trump a win. Shortly thereafter, on Thursday, lawyers for the board informed the judge that they were withdrawing their opposition to Trump's proposed subpoena of Adler, who retired from Reuters in 2021.
The withdrawal does not guarantee that Trump will obtain internal documents from Adler—the president's attorneys first need to secure approval for the subpoena in New York, where Adler lives, and Adler can launch his own effort to shield the documents from there. The withdrawal does, however, come on the back of a string of positive developments for Trump in the lawsuit, which he filed in December 2022.
On Wednesday, a Florida appeals court judge denied the Pulitzer board members' motion to dismiss the suit in a lengthy ruling that took the board to task for standing by the "now-debunked allegations that [Trump] colluded with the Russians to win the 2016 presidential election." Before that, on Feb. 3, circuit court judge Robert Pegg ruled that the board's internal communications regarding the award are fair game for the discovery process in the lawsuit.
That could pave the way for the release of internal deliberations involving board members, a prestigious list that includes Post columnist Eugene Robinson, Atlantic writer Anne Applebaum, New Yorker editor David Remnick, and former Columbia University president Lee Bollinger. Pulitzer's lawyers cited the judge's ruling on the internal communications as the reason for the reversal in Thursday's filing.
In his lawsuit, Trump alleged that the Times and Post stories were replete with references to the FBI investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. But that investigation, Trump said, was "based on manufactured political disinformation paid for by the Clinton Campaign."
That’s a reference to the Steele dossier, the salacious report funded by the Clinton campaign that claimed there was a "well-developed conspiracy of cooperation" between Trump and Russia. The report, authored by former British spy Christopher Steele, also alleged without evidence that the Kremlin had sexual blackmail on Trump.
Many of the articles cited for the Pulitzer Prize made reference to the Steele dossier, including a Post story that said the FBI had an agreement to pay Steele to gather information about Trump. The story said the arrangement suggested the FBI found Steele credible.
But the Steele dossier has largely been debunked. Special Counsel John Durham found that Steele’s primary source for the dossier fabricated most of the allegations about collusion. The Department of Justice’s inspector general found that the FBI and Department of Justice improperly used the dossier to obtain warrants to surveil the Trump campaign. The Post story did not mention that the FBI cut ties with Steele in October 2016 because he leaked information to the media.
The board sought to keep Adler’s involvement a secret, but Semafor revealed him as the author last month. After Trump took office in 2017, Adler issued a memo that Reuters would cover Trump similarly to how it covers authoritarian regimes in Russia, Iran, and elsewhere.
Trump’s lawsuit could also unveil the deliberations of the five-person jury that awarded the 2018 prize. One of the jurors, former McClatchy editor Kristin Roberts, peddled debunked claims about Russiagate.
In 2018, Roberts defended two controversial McClatchy reports that former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen met with Kremlin operatives in Prague in 2016—a central claim of the since-debunked Steele dossier. After Cohen vehemently denied the McClatchy stories, Roberts accused him of lying. She doubled down on the stories even after Special Counsel Robert Mueller revealed in a report in 2019 that Cohen had not visited Prague.
The board did not address questions about the Adler report but instead provided a generic response about the Trump lawsuit.
"This lawsuit is about intimidation of the press and those who support it—and we will not be intimidated," said a spokesperson for the board. "The Pulitzer Board will continue to recognize the accomplishments of journalists, writers, artists, and composers at the highest level. We look forward to continuing our defense of journalism."