FILE – President Donald Trump walks from Marine One after arriving on the South Lawn of the White House, Tuesday, July 15, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)
In a win for Donald Trump and his legal team, the Florida Supreme Court this week refused to grant a rehearing to Pulitzer Prize board members who tried and failed to stop the president”s defamation lawsuit over 2018 Washington Post and New York Times Russia probe reporting awards until he’s out of office.
The word from the court on Tuesday was extremely brief but nonetheless significant, as several justices concurred in the denial without elaboration:
This cause having heretofore been submitted to the Court on jurisdictional briefs and portions of the record deemed necessary to reflect jurisdiction under Article V, Section 3(b), Florida Constitution, and the Court having determined that it should decline to accept jurisdiction, it is ordered that the petition for review is denied.
No motion for rehearing will be entertained by the Court. See Fla. R. App. P. 9.330(d)(2).
The upshot here is that the case can once again proceed in the trial court. In July 2024, Trump persuaded Senior 19th Judicial Circuit Judge Robert Pegg that the president’s claims were “properly pled” and that a 2022 statement from the board standing by New York Times and Washington Post reporting on special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe was “actionable mixed opinion.”
Trump attorney Quincy Bird reportedly reacted to the Florida Supreme Court’s denial by saying it was a “correct and just decision” that will allow a “very illuminating discovery process” to continue.
Other than docket entries acknowledging ongoing state appellate and Supreme Court filings, the trial court case has been quiet since March, when Pegg first rejected board members’ request for a stay based on Trump’s status as president. The only question now is whether the board, like other media entities, will try to settle the case rather than subjecting itself to a potentially damaging discovery process and a jury trial.
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Andrew W. Mellon Foundation President Elizabeth Alexander and The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, among more than a dozen other board members named in Trump’s suit, had asked Florida’s top court to shut down the case on the idea that it would too burdensome and a distraction hindering Trump from carrying out his duties as president.
In opposing that argument, Trump’s attorneys called the last-ditch request for a yearslong stay in the state civil case an “analytically confused and wrong” attempt to claim an immunity from suit that belongs to the chief executive alone.
When Trump first filed the lawsuit in 2022, he sought to hold the Pulitzer board member defendants liable for the following statement that backed awards for Russia probe reporting and pointed to independent reviews of the coverage to rebuff the then-private citizen’s demands to rescind the prizes:
The Pulitzer Prize Board has an established, formal process by which complaints against winning entries are carefully reviewed. In the last three years, the Pulitzer Board has received inquiries, including from former President Donald Trump, about submissions from The New York Times and The Washington Post on Russian interference in the U.S. election and its connections to the Trump campaign—submissions that jointly won the 2018 National Reporting prize.
These inquiries prompted the Pulitzer Board to commission two independent reviews of the work submitted by those organizations to our National Reporting competition. Both reviews were conducted by individuals with no connection to the institutions whose work was under examination, nor any connection to each other. The separate 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.
The board members’ attorneys offered up that same defense in a brief before the Supreme Court of Florida, writing that the “twenty award-winning articles […] reported facts that Respondent has never contested, and none of the Articles has since been retracted or corrected.”
Trump lawyers said that was “ludicrous.”
“In their Statement of the Case and Facts, Petitioners stray far beyond the facts stated in the district court’s opinion. They even falsely pretend that President Trump has never contested the articles published by The New York Times and The Washington Post maliciously and wrongly asserting that his campaign colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election,” the brief said, adding that the board members “are not entitled to their own version of reality.”
The Pulitzer board failed at the state’s Fourth District Court of Appeal as well in asserting that because Trump can claim immunity from suit while he’s president, the members should essentially able to assert that right for him.
“Petitioners effectively ask that the court invoke a temporary immunity under the Supremacy Clause on [Trump’s] behalf to stay this civil proceeding, even though [Trump] has not sought such relief,” the appellate court explained. “They further allege that it would violate due process to allow [Trump] to claim constitutional entitlement to stay cases because of his office but not allow them the same ability.”
“But such privileges are afforded to the President alone, not to his litigation adversaries,” the appellate court added, dubbing Trump a “willing participant” that is “uniquely equipped to determine how to use his time” and has not invoked immunity.
