Florida judge says Pulitzer board’s communications are fair game in Trump lawsuit
President Donald Trump racked up his latest legal victory in Florida on Monday, after a state judge ruled the Pulitzer Prize board’s internal communications are fair game for discovery in a lawsuit Trump filed over the awards the board gave the New York Times and Washington Post in 2018 for their coverage of Russiagate.
Judge Robert L. Pegg, a circuit court judge in Okeechobee County, declined the board’s request to shield its internal communications from the lawsuit’s discovery phase. Trump sued the board in 2022 over its award to the Times and Post four years earlier for a series of stories that the board said “dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections” to Trump.
In his lawsuit, Trump said the board “rewarded” the newspapers “for lying to the American public” about the “now-debunked theory” that he conspired with Russia to influence the election. A series of federal investigations found no evidence that Trump colluded with the Kremlin.
Pegg rejected a motion by the board to avoid handing over internal deliberations about the award, saying the board failed to show that the discovery process will create “annoyance, embarrassment, oppression, or undue burden or expense,” according to the ruling, first reported by Fox News.
The judge’s decision is the latest media-related legal victory for Trump. ABC News in December settled with the president, who sued the network over anchor George Stephanopoulos’s repeated claims that Trump is “a rapist.” And CBS News is reportedly considering settling with Trump in his lawsuit alleging that the network deceptively edited an interview with former vice president Kamala Harris before the election.
Trump’s attorney, Quincy Bird, said he would pursue a “thorough” discovery process.
“This case will now proceed to a very thorough discovery process and President Trump is committed to seeing this case through to a just conclusion,” Bird told the Washington Free Beacon.
The decision will likely give Trump’s legal team—and the public—an inside view into the deliberations of the Pulitzer Board, which counts some of the country’s most high-profile newspaper editors and public intellectuals as members.
Post columnist Eugene Robinson chaired the Pulitzer Board when the prize was awarded to the Times and Post. Journalists and executives from the Times, NPR, Bloomberg, USA Today, and the Poynter Institute, a liberal media watchdog, served on the board. Then-Columbia University president Lee Bollinger was also on the board.
The board awarded the Pulitzer to the Times and Post for 20 news stories they published about Trump and his associates’ alleged ties to Russia. One Post story touted the infamous Steele dossier, which the FBI and media outlets cited early in the Russiagate scandal as evidence that Trump conspired with Russia. Investigations have since debunked most of the dossier’s most explosive claims, including that the Kremlin blackmailed Trump with a sex tape.
One juror who voted on the 2018 award also peddled debunked claims about Russiagate. Kristin Roberts, an editor at McClatchy newspapers, defended the outlet’s controversial 2018 reports that former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen two years earlier had traveled to Prague to meet with Kremlin operatives. The allegation was a key part of the Steele dossier and often held up as one of the strongest pieces of evidence that the Trump team colluded with Russia.
After Cohen vehemently denied the McClatchy stories, Roberts asserted that Cohen was lying and said that “this is a man who is a convicted liar and any good journalist would tell you that throws into doubt his credibility as a source.”
Roberts doubled down on the McClatchy reports even after Special Counsel Robert Mueller found that Cohen had not visited Prague.
“The Mueller report states Mr. Cohen was not in Prague. It makes no statement on whether the investigation ever had evidence that Mr. Cohen’s phone pinged in or near Prague, as McClatchy reported,” Roberts said after the release of the Mueller report in 2019.
A trial date for Trump’s lawsuit has not been set.
