by WorldTribune Staff, February 13, 2025 Real World News
A Florida appeals court on Wednesday rejected the Pulitzer board’s request to dismiss President Donald Trump’s defamation lawsuit.
The lawsuit, which Trump filed in 2022 in Okeechobee County, contends that he was defamed by a statement posted online by the Pulitzer board after it refused Trump’s call to rescind the Pulitzer Prizes awarded in 2018 to The New York Times and Washington Post for their reporting on the Russiagate investigation.
The Pulitzer board said it commissioned two independent reviews of the Times and Post reporting and declined to rescind the award decision. The board said in a statement posted online that the “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 contended that the statement was defamation in that it accused him of colluding with Russia after the matter had already been widely exposed as a hoax.
A three-judge panel of the 4th District Court of Appeal on Wednesday rejected the Pulitzer board’s arguments that the lawsuit should be dismissed.
The court rejected the Pulitzer board members’ argument that the lawsuit should be dismissed, in part, because 19 of the defendants were not Florida residents. They argued that as a result, Florida courts did not have legal “jurisdiction” over those defendants. The only other defendant was Neil Brown, president of the St. Petersburg-based Poynter Institute.
Circuit Judge Robert Pegg rejected the jurisdiction argument involving the out-of-state residents, leading the defendants to appeal. But the appeals-court panel Wednesday upheld Pegg’s decision.
“Trump’s operative pleading sufficiently pled that the defendants engaged in a conspiracy to defame him,” said Wednesday’s main opinion, written by Judge Jeffre Kuntz and joined by Judges Burton Conner and Ed Artau. “Further, the defendants issued the website public statement in response to the requests of a Florida resident — Trump. They did so in a meeting attended remotely by a Florida resident (Brown) who also conducted an editing review of the proposed website statement while in Florida.”
Judge Artau wrote: “As noted in the President’s complaint, Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Attorney General William Barr, the House of Representatives’ Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and the United States Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence all concluded ‘there was no evidence of collusion between President Trump, the Trump Campaign, and Russia.’
“Therefore, the trial court correctly denied the non-resident defendants’ motion to dismiss the President’s claims over the asserted publication of defamatory ‘FAKE NEWS.’
“In other words, as the President asserts, ‘[t]he Russia Collusion Hoax was dead, at least until Defendants [as members of the Pulitzer Prize board] attempted to resurrect it’ by conspiring to publish a defamatory statement falsely implying that the President colluded with the Russians.”
Trump’s attorney, Quincy Bird, said in a statement following the ruling: “Today’s ruling is an unequivocal victory for President Trump in his pursuit of justice against the Pulitzer Prize board members for their dishonest and defamatory conduct,” said Bird. “President Trump is committed to holding those who traffic in fake news, lies, and smears to account, and he looks forward to seeing his powerful cases through to a just conclusion.”
POTUS winning lawsuits left and right. Here’s another. His suit against the Pulitzer board can proceed.https://t.co/1PEsSrNHHg
— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) February 13, 2025
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