President Donald Trump participates in a session of the G7 Summit, Monday, June 16, 2025, in Kananaskis, Canada. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
Soon, the Pulitzer Prize board members will aim to persuade Florida’s top court to halt President Donald Trump’s defamation lawsuit against them.
On Monday, the Florida Supreme Court docketed an appeal of an intermediary court’s order that rejected the board’s efforts.
Trump wants to advance with discovery in this case. Meanwhile, the board seeks to temporarily stop proceedings until the end of the 45th and 47th president’s current presidential term.
On May 28, Florida’s Fourth District Court of Appeal refused to grant the stay requested and upheld the trial court’s order from the summer of 2024, which determined that Trump’s claims justified the litigation.
Love true crime? Sign up for our newsletter, The Law&Crime Docket, to get the latest real-life crime stories delivered right to your inbox.
In typical fashion, the Sunshine State’s highest court accepted the appeal with little fanfare or attention — the docket entry is minimal. The ultimate arguments presented to the court have also yet to be included on the docket, which is currently focused on housekeeping issues.
But the two-page notice to invoke discretionary jurisdiction sheds some light on how the board will approach the case going forward.
“The decision is within the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction…because it expressly construes provisions of the U.S. Constitution,” the filing reads.
The notice goes on to cite some of the scene-setting language used by the appellate court in the earlier-failed appeal.
A parenthetical explains, at length:
[A]cknowledging “that state court litigation involving a sitting President raises unique and profound questions under the Constitution,” and that “[b]ecause the President embodies the Executive Branch of the federal government, state courts must be restrained from interfering with his office’s operations under both the Supremacy Clause, contained in Article VI, Clause 2, of the United States Constitution, and Article II of the United States Constitution,” but concluding that Article II and the Supremacy Clause do not require a state court to temporarily stay a civil lawsuit in which the sitting President of the United States is the plaintiff, and which involves claims that implicate the President’s official conduct, until the President’s term in office has concluded…
In essence, the Pulitzer board members appear likely to offer a reprise of the arguments that failed to convince the appellate court.
In January, the board argued that moving forward with the lawsuit “would now raise constitutional concerns for this court — or any other state court — to exercise ‘direct control’ over” Trump during his presidency. The motion to stay cited the supremacy and take care clauses of the U.S. Constitution in service of this argument.
This was, effectively, the board trying to use some of Trump’s own previous arguments against him.
The original motion to stay was premised on Trump being president of the United States. That effort cited two sections of the U.S. Constitution – the Supremacy Clause and the Take Care clause – as well as pages of long-standing constitutional case law interpreting those cited sections.
Trump himself has, of course, and on several occasions, successfully cited those same sections of the Constitution in order to pump the brakes on civil lawsuits in which he is the named defendant. And, in turn, several pieces of case law directly relevant to the analysis of those constitutional sections involves Trump himself.
So, far, however, the Florida court system has deemed this topsy-turvy effort entirely unavailing.
“[S]uch privileges are afforded to the President alone, not to his litigation adversaries,” the appellate court ruled.
Now, the board will have one last chance to make its case – in an effort to avoid revealing further information about the editorial decisions and other communications that led to this allegedly defamatory statement at issue.
Trump sued the board for defamation in December 2022, after several months of legal demands and threats to file such a lawsuit. The nexus of the lawsuit is the 2018 award for National Reporting which was co-granted to The Washington Post and The New York Times for their reporting on the “Russiagate” scandal — the yearslong search for evidence that Trump’s campaign was engaged in a conspiracy with the Russian government, sparked by revelations that during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, some Russian nationals interfered on Trump’s behalf.
While special counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiries ultimately found no evidence of collusion with the Russian Federation, the two media companies were rewarded for what the Pulitzer Prize board referred to as “deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.”
Unfortunately for the board, that was not all it said about the matter — ultimately responding publicly to Trump’s threats.
In 2022, the board defended its award with a lengthy statement that stood by the outlets’ reporting. In July 2024, a judge in Okeechobee County, Florida, ruled that the board’s statement was “actionable mixed opinion” and that Trump’s claims were “properly pled.”
