A Collusion Hoax Coda

In April 2018, the Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting was awarded jointly to the New York Times and The Washington Post for their reporting on the Russia collusion hoax that was concocted by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Subsequently, multiple investigations confirmed that the claim of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia was false and, indeed, a completely unfounded fraud.

President Trump and others then called on the Pulitzer Prize committee to rescind its 2018 award. In July 2022, the Pulitzer board issued a response in which it stated:

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.

So the Pulitzer committee stood alone (except insofar as it was accompanied by the Democratic National Committee) in reaffirming the collusion hoax long after it had collapsed.

That caused President Trump to sue the individual members of the Pulitzer committee (there is actually no Pulitzer Prize entity) for defamation in state court in Okeechobee County, Florida. We can surmise that the venue is not hostile to the President. The 19 defendants moved to dismiss the case; that motion was denied by the presiding judge, Robert Pegg, in an order of July 20, 2024. The defendants probably knew they were in trouble when they read this:

…[t]he New York Times (the “Times”) and The Washington Post (the “Post”)…reported extensively on the allegations that President Trump or persons connected to him had colluded with the Russian Government to win the 2016 presidential election (the “Russia Collusion Hoax”).

Defendants sought to dismiss Trump’s case on the ground that their endorsement of the hoax was a mere statement of opinion, not fact, and as such was not actionable. Judge Pegg properly, in my opinion, rejected this claim. It is remarkable how left-wing “news” organizations hold themselves out as arbiters of truth, but whenever they are called to account their principal defense is that everything they say is “mere opinion” which no one should take seriously.

So the 19 individual defendants are in it for the long haul, which means paying lawyers lots of money. The next stage of the lawsuit, following denial of the motion to dismiss, is discovery. Trump wants the defendants to produce all of the communications among themselves relating to their reaffirmation of the prize award in 2022–an entirely reasonable request. For reasons that we can surmise, the defendants want to keep their documents to themselves.

Defendants made a motion for a protective order that would prevent Trump or his lawyers from making public certain documents that will be produced; in particular, “information about the internal deliberations of the Pulitzer Prize Board.” While this is not entirely clear from the Court’s Order, it appears that Defendants’ motion was directed to the confidentiality of such documents, not their responsibility to produce them.

Yesterday, Judge Pegg rejected the defendants’ objections and ordered them to comply with Trump’s discovery requests, without any provision for confidentiality. Absent a protective order, which the court refused to enter, there is nothing to stop Trump or his lawyers from making public any documents they receive from Defendants.

There are two potential outcomes of this case. First, since the court denied Defendants’ motion to dismiss, a rural Florida jury may have the opportunity to award Trump damages for defamation. Second, we all may be afforded a behind-the-scenes look at how a thoroughly politicized Pulitzer board decided to libel Donald Trump in order to aid the Democrats in the 2024 presidential election.

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