On Thursday, members of the Pulitzer Prize Board filed legal documents in Okeechobee County, Florida, seeking extensive discovery as a countermeasure against President Donald Trump’s defamation lawsuit concerning awards given for reporting on the Russia investigation.

The 12-page file, prepared by the law firms Ballard Spahr and Atherton Galardi Mullen & Reeder, represents 20 defendants named in the case.

Among the defendants are prominent figures such as Andrew W. Mellon Foundation president Elizabeth Alexander, The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, former Boston Globe editor Nancy Barnes, past Columbia University president Lee C. Bollinger, celebrated journalist Katherine Boo, Poynter Institute president Neil Brown, ex-USA Today Editor-in-Chief Nicole Carroll, former Columbia Journalism School dean Steve Coll, New York Times columnist Gail Collins, Associated Press Vice President and Editor at Large John Daniszewski, Editor and Vice President at the Philadelphia Inquirer Gabriel Escobar, UCLA historian and professor Kelly Lytle Hernandez, longtime Pulitzer Prize Deputy Administrator Edward Kliment, New York Times columnist Carlos Lozada, former Los Angeles Times Executive Editor Kevin Merida, Pulitzer Prize Administrator Marjorie Miller, USC professor Viet Thahn Nguyen, CEO of The 19th Emily Ramshaw, New Yorker editor David Remnick, and Harvard University philosophy professor Tommie Shelby.

This initial “set of requests for production of documents” requires Trump to respond by December 11, allowing his legal team at Weber, Crabb & Wein, P.A., to assert any privilege claims.

The filing stipulates that if information is withheld due to privilege claims, the basis and specific grounds for such claims must be outlined, according to the document.

The defendants are seeking a broad range of documents, including those related to Trump’s calls for the awards to be rescinded, his threats of litigation, proof of the alleged impact of the board’s statement on the 2020 presidential election, and details of Trump’s various legal battles—ranging from counterclaims and defenses against E. Jean Carroll to lawsuits involving media outlets like CNN, ABC, CBS, the Wall Street Journal, and Rupert Murdoch concerning Jeffrey Epstein-related reporting.

The defendants further demanded “all” of Trump’s tax returns — “from all jurisdictions, including all attachments, schedules, and worksheets” — from 2015 to the present day, documents “sufficient to show all sources of Your income” over the same time period, documents “sufficient to show all of Your financial holdings” and his liabilities, and finally his health records and prescription medication history.

“To the extent You seek damages for any physical ailment or mental or emotional injury arising from Counts I-IV of Your Complaint, all Documents (whether held by You or by third parties under Your control or who could produce them at your direction) concerning Your medical and/or psychological health from January 1, 2015, to present, including any prescription medications you have been prescribed or have taken,” the filing concluded. “For the avoidance of doubt, this includes all Documents Concerning Your annual physical examination. To the extent you do not seek such damages in this action, please confirm so in writing.”

A Trump legal spokesperson told Fox News that this “powerhouse lawsuit” will reach a “winning conclusion.”

“This case has always been about correcting the record, revealing the truth, and vindicating the president and his supporters against the lies told to the American people by the Democrats and their PR machine known as ‘legacy media,’” the statement reportedly said.

Trump filed the glacially paced lawsuit in 2022, after the Pulitzer Prize Board released a statement rebuffing his demands to rescind 2018 prizes for the New York Times and the Washington Post, even as the then-former president claimed the board was “perpetuating the absurdly false and defamatory narrative contrived by the President’s political opponents: that he and his campaign somehow colluded with Vladimir Putin and the Russian government to gain advantage in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and thereafter maintained some nefarious connection with Russian elements during the presidential transition and Trump administration (the ‘Russia Collusion Hoax’).”

The board’s statement cited “two independent reviews” of the Times and Post’s reporting to conclude that the prizes “stand,” as “no” aspects of the award-winning articles on former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe were “discredited”:

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 2018 Pulitzer Prizes in National Reporting stand.

Trump’s legal team has since moved to depose Stephen J. Adler, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press Steering Committee’s chairman and a former longtime reporter and editor at the Wall Street Journal identified by Semafor in January as a confidential reviewer of the Times and Post articles in question.

When Trump proposed a subpoena of Adler, the defendants sought a protective order to keep “confidential” the Pulitzer Prize Board’s “internal deliberations and review,” making the case that disclosure thereof could “chill the candor of future Board deliberations and independent reviews.” Senior 19th Judicial Circuit Judge Robert Pegg rejected that request in early February, pointing out the Pulitzer Prize Board is “not a legally cognizable entity,” and so the “‘internal deliberations of the Pulitzer Prize Board’ is properly read as the ‘internal deliberations of the co-Defendants’ which are otherwise discoverable […] and not covered by a claim of privilege or statutory protection,” the docket reviewed by Law&Crime showed.

When the judge in the case declined to dismiss, he concluded that the board’s statement standing by the prizes constituted “actionable mixed opinion.”

“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 Defendants’ decision to let 2018 Pulitzer Prizes in National Reporting stand, 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,” Pegg ruled in July 2024, noting that Mueller’s investigation did not ultimately allege conspiracy between the then-45th president’s 2016 campaign and Russia — though the special counsel’s report did identify “numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign.”

After trips to state appellate court and the Florida Supreme Court, the defamation suit returned to Pegg’s court in earnest back in September.