This week, the Florida Supreme Court delivered a favorable outcome for Donald Trump and his legal team. They declined a request for a rehearing from Pulitzer Prize board members who attempted unsuccessfully to halt Trump’s defamation lawsuit concerning the 2018 Russia investigation coverage by The Washington Post and The New York Times, until his presidency concludes.

The word from the court on Tuesday was extremely brief but nonetheless significant, as several justices concurred in the denial without elaboration:

The decision reached was based on submissions regarding jurisdiction according to Article V, Section 3(b) of the Florida Constitution, alongside other essential records. Consequently, it was decided that the court would not accept jurisdiction, thus the motion for a review was denied.

No motion for rehearing will be entertained by the Court. See Fla. R. App. P. 9.330(d)(2).

This means the case is set to continue in the trial court. Back in July 2024, Trump convinced Senior 19th Judicial Circuit Judge Robert Pegg that his claims against the board were “properly pled.” Additionally, a 2022 statement by the board in support of the publications’ coverage of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation was deemed an “actionable mixed opinion.”

Quincy Bird, Trump’s lawyer, reportedly stated that the denial by the Florida Supreme Court was a “correct and just decision,” paving the way for a “very illuminating discovery process” to proceed.

The trial court case hasn’t seen significant developments since March, marked by routine entries acknowledging ongoing appellate activities. In March, Judge Pegg denied board members’ request for a stay due to Trump’s presidential position. The outstanding question is whether the board, similar to other media organizations, will consider settling the case instead of enduring a potentially harmful discovery phase and jury trial.

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.