President Donald Trump gestures while speaking with reporters in the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House, Monday, April 6, 2026, in Washington (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson).
There”s a war going on between Donald Trump and Pulitzer Prize Board members, and this week the president revealed who he’ll be grilling next behind closed doors.
Court records reviewed by Law&Crime showed two notices Thursday in Florida state court, indicating that former longtime Associated Press executive editor Kathleen Carroll and former Los Angeles Times executive editor Kevin Merida, a current board member, will sit for video depositions on April 15 and April 21, respectively.
It’s not immediately clear what Carroll will be questioned about, as she is not a named defendant but is a former member of the board and was once the co-chair. Law&Crime sought comment from a Trump attorney on the notice as to Carroll.
Trump has been seeking discovery that he hopes will demonstrate the Pulitzer board cast aside its prestigious standards and practices to leave untouched various 2018 awards for Washington Post and New York Times reports about the late special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, Michael Flynn, the Steele Dossier, former FBI Director James Comey, Donald Trump Jr. and the 2016 Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer, and Russian troll farms.
The notices follow numerous other question and answer sessions and Trump’s move last month to demand documents from board member and New Yorker editor David Remnick, prying into his “communications” with the co-founders of Fusion GPS, the firm that funded former British spy Christopher Steele’s dossier. The court filing alluded to an August 2016 meeting Remnick had with Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch and sought details of what was said immediately before and after it, and the six years that followed. Among a series of other Jane Mayer stories, the New Yorker published an interview in 2019 in which the co-founders defended their research.
A separate but failed Trump lawsuit explained Trump’s interest in this area, alleging Fusion GPS and his then-opponent Hillary Clinton conspired in a racketeering scheme to cook up a “fraudulent ‘dossier'” that would harm his campaign, his business interests, and cast a cloud over his first term.
The board has made waves of its own in discovery with requests for Trump’s tax returns, records on “medical and/or psychological health” and “any prescription medications,” and for a “complete and unredacted copy” of Mueller’s report, putting to the test Trump’s claims that a “defamatory” board statement backing Russia probe reporting awards harmed his reputation.
Just as Mueller’s former law firm recently opposed a Trump executive order as retaliation for its employment and views of the former special counsel, the board has argued that it took the president’s claims seriously, investigated them, and had the articles independently reviewed — only to be punished with a lawsuit for declining to rewrite history.
After the board resisted the president’s look into its “internal deliberations and review” and lost a long-shot bid to halt the lawsuit in its entirety until he’s out of office, Trump forced Stephen J. Adler, the “independent reviewer” the board relied on, to sit for a deposition. Semafor identified Adler as the reviewer in January.
In 2022, the board released the statement Trump claimed was defamatory, rebuffing his demands to rescind the awards. The statement cited “two independent reviews” of the Times and Post’s reporting — Adler’s conclusions that the prizes “stand,” as “no” aspects of the award-winning articles were “discredited.”
Once his investigation concluded, Mueller famously testified before Congress that Trump was not “exculpated” even though the former special counsel did not allege a grand conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia or obstruction offenses. Trump submits that makes the Russia probe a “Collusion Hoax” and its boosters defamers, even as the special counsel’s report identified “numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign.”
