Earlier this week, President Donald Trump’s legal team dismissed attempts by Pulitzer Prize board members to pause his defamation lawsuit regarding their 2018 awards to The Washington Post and The New York Times for Russia probe coverage. They described the board’s request for a prolonged delay as “confusing and incorrect,” arguing the defendants were wrongly trying to use an immunity that is exclusive to the President.

The motion, submitted on Monday to the Florida Supreme Court, urged the state’s highest court to dismiss the petition from Elizabeth Alexander, President of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic, along with more than a dozen other board members named in Trump’s lawsuit, citing a lack of jurisdiction.

Lawyers from Weber, Crabb, & Wein, P.A. argued that the defendants’ proposal to delay action until after Trump’s potential second term is legally “incorrect,” and they found it equally “ridiculous” that the defendants claimed to have conducted two independent studies of the Russia probe reporting, alleging these studies showed no discreditation despite later information.

It should be noted that in July 2024, a state judge decided not to dismiss Trump’s defamation conspiracy case, determining that a 2022 statement supporting the 2017 coverage by The New York Times and The Washington Post on the Russia probe led by special counsel Robert Mueller could be considered “actionable mixed opinion,” and that Trump’s allegations were “adequately stated.”

When Trump initiated the lawsuit in 2022, he aimed to make the Pulitzer board members accountable for endorsing a statement that supported the prizes for the Russia probe reporting. This statement mentioned independent reviews of the reporting to counter the former president’s, at the time a private citizen, calls to revoke the awards:

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 as recently as last month 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 have now responded by calling that “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.”

From here, Trump’s legal team took aim at the issue raised by the board members.

According to the petitioner-defendants, there’s a legitimate unanswered question of whether the Constitution “permits a sitting President to proceed with a civil lawsuit in state court over claims implicating his official conduct, or whether the Constitution requires the state court to stay such litigation until the President’s term in office concludes.”

In May, Trump saw Florida’s Fourth District Court of Appeal reject the board members’ arguments that the president’s defamation lawsuit had to be halted until he was out of office, under the notion that if Trump can claim immunity from a burdensome suit during his term the defendants should be able to protect their due process rights through a stay — especially considering that the allegedly offending reporting regarded “official acts” from his first term.

“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.

Though the petitioner-defendants have maintained that this issue is “vitally important, because allowing a case to proceed would necessarily subject the President to direct control by a state court judge” while also jeopardizing their due process rights, Trump’s attorneys ripped these contentions as “analytically confused and wrong.”

“Petitioners claim a stay is required until President Trump leaves office because the 2017 Pulitzer Prize-winning articles reported on ‘official acts,’ thus placing them in issue. Setting aside that Petitioners are being sued for their conduct occurring in 2022 when President Trump was not in office, their ‘official acts’ argument confuses two distinct Article II immunities,” the brief said. “‘Official acts’ immunity is a substantive defense that applies regardless of whether the President is in office at the time of litigation. By contrast, the kind of immunity improperly invoked by Petitioners is designed to protect a sitting President from the unique burdens of defending unwelcome lawsuits during his tenure.”

In closing, Trump lawyers asked the state high court to simply affirm that the appellate court was right to rule “based on long-settled precedent regarding standing, and not on any construction of a provision of the U.S. Constitution.” The appellate court decided that the board members lacked standing to raise concerns about Trump’s own suit burdening his “Presidential duties” because “generally, one cannot assert someone else’s constitutional rights.”

Taken together, that means the Florida Supreme Court doesn’t have jurisdiction to hear a petition rooted in “speculative concerns of potential harms that [the board members] themselves will never suffer,” the Trump brief said.