Trump lawsuit against Pulitzer Board can move forward
A defamation lawsuit filed by former President Donald Trump against the Pulitzer Board can move forward, after a judge ruled on an attempt to dismiss the suit.
Senior Circuit Judge Robert L. Pegg issued the ruling Saturday. The Pulitzer Prize Board made a statement in 2022 about independently reviewing reports from The New York Times and The Washington Post about the Trump campaign’s alleged connections to Russia. The two papers had won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for these reports.
The Pulitzer Board did not immediately return a request for comment from the Deseret News.
After the prizes were issued, Robert S. Mueller III investigated whether or not Trump coordinated with Russia. According to a U.S. attorney general letter issued about the investigation, this effort “did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
Trump sued the Pulitzer Board for the statement made in 2022, after calls for the board to revoke the awards. The statement said the board commissioned two independent reviews of the reporting and determined “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.”
The Washington Post and The New York Times were not sued by Trump over the Pulitzer Prize-winning articles, according to the Times. The campaign did unsuccessfully sue over opinion pieces.
The court allowed Trump’s suit against Pulitzer Board to move forward
Lawyers for the Pulitzer Board argued the statement was an opinion and thus, could not be defamatory.
“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 the Defendants’ decision to let 2018 Pulitzer Prizes in National Reporting stand,” said the court, “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 court said defendants did not explain how the formal review process worked and failed to disclose who did these independent reviews.
The order also said “the reader is left to wonder” if the review even attempted to verify the anonymous sources that “were critical to advancing the larger Russia Collusion Hoax narrative.”
In addition, the court pointed toward the Pulitzer Board’s use of the phrase “Trump campaign.” The court said candidates are closely associated with their campaign.
The court said a reasonable reader could conclude by issuing the statement asserting the reports from 2017 were true, “defendants were asserting that President Trump had himself colluded with the Russians using his campaign staff, his transition team, and his administration as proxies.”
“If that implication proves false, as President Trump contends, it is defamatory per se,” said the court.
Trump took to social media to celebrate the ruling.
“Just heard that today, during our amazing Rally in the Great State of Michigan, esteemed Florida Circuit Court Judge, Robert L. Pegg, issued a Powerful Decision totally and completely DENYING the Pulitzer Prize Board’s desperate attempt to dismiss my ironclad Defamation Lawsuit against them for awarding the once respected Pulitzer Prizes to Fake News Stories about the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax by The Failing New York Times and The Washington Compost,” said Trump.
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Source: Dessert News