New York Times and Washington Post 2018 Pulitzer Prize winners for their garbage Trump-Russia collusion hoax—From left: Maggie Haberman, Jo Becker, Matt Apuzzo, Rosalind Helderman, Tom Hamburger, Ellen Nakashima, Adam Entous, Greg Miller and Mark Mazetti accept the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting from Columbia University.
President Donald Trump has secured another victory in his ongoing battle against “fake news” and “the Russia collusion hoax.”
On Tuesday, a Florida appeals court unanimously decided not to dismiss Trump’s defamation lawsuit against the Pulitzer Prize Board, signaling a major blow to the defenders of the now-debunked narrative that Trump colluded with Russia during the 2016 election.
The suit challenges the legitimacy of the 2018 Pulitzer Prizes awarded to fake news, The New York Times and The Washington Post, for their coverage of the debunked Trump-Russia collusion hoax.
The roots of this narrative trace back to July 2020, when the Senate Judiciary Committee released damning documents that debunked the New York Times’s story of the Trump team’s alleged “repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials.”
These declassified documents exposed the reporting as not only dishonest but also as an early attempt to fuel the baseless Russiagate narrative.
Further revelations in May 2022 confirmed that it was Hillary Clinton’s campaign that orchestrated the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, as admitted under oath by her former campaign manager Robbie Mook during the Sussman trial.
Hillary Clinton-linked Perkins Coie lawyer Michael Sussmann was indicted for lying to the FBI about not representing “any client” when he was actually acting as a running dog for Hillary. Sussmann tipped off the bureau about the Trump Organization allegedly secretly communicating with Russian Alfa Bank.
According to a debunked story published by the far-left outlet Slate, Trump set up a secret server at Trump Tower on 5th Avenue to “communicate privately with a Putin-tied Russian bank called Alfa Bank.”
The FBI began investigating the Trump Organization’s alleged “back-channel” with the Russian-owned bank after Sussmann presented data files to support the claims.
It was all a lie, and Hillary hatched the lie and then later promoted the lie.
The Pulitzer Prize Board then awarded the Times and the Post for what they described as “deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage” of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
However, subsequent investigations by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Attorney General William Barr, and both the House and Senate intelligence committees concluded there was no evidence of collusion, exposing the awarded reporting as factually inaccurate and a complete fraud.
Despite these findings, the Pulitzer Prize Board has refused to retract the awards given to The New York Times and The Washington Post, leading Trump to file a defamation lawsuit against the board in December 2022.
Trump’s lawsuit, filed in Okeechobee County, Florida, claims that the Pulitzer Prize Board’s refusal to rescind these awards constitutes defamation, arguing that the board’s stance perpetuates a “demonstrably false connection” between Trump and Russian interference.
“A large swath of Americans had a tremendous misunderstanding of the truth at the time the Times’ and the Post’s propagation of the Russia Collusion Hoax dominated the media,” the complaint reads. “Remarkably, they were rewarded for lying to the American public.”
On Tuesday, a Florida appellate court unanimously affirmed the trial court’s decision to deny the Board’s motion to dismiss the case, allowing the lawsuit to proceed.
The appellate court’s decision focused on jurisdictional issues, particularly whether Florida courts have authority over the non-resident defendants—19 Pulitzer Board members residing outside the state.
The court concluded that the defendants’ actions, including issuing a public statement in response to Trump’s requests and involving a Florida resident in the drafting process, established sufficient connections to Florida. This connection justified the court’s jurisdiction over the case.
Judge Ed Artau, in a concurring opinion, emphasized that Trump’s complaint sufficiently alleged that the defendants conspired to publish a defamatory statement, Fox News reported.
He noted that multiple investigations, including those by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and congressional committees, found no evidence of collusion between Trump, his campaign, and Russia.
Artau suggested that the Pulitzer Board’s statement, which upheld the original awards, could be seen as a deliberate attempt to perpetuate the debunked allegations, potentially meeting the standard for defamation.
According to the ruling:
Because Trump met the personal jurisdiction requirements of Florida’s long arm statute and the Due Process Clause, the circuit court’s order is affirmed.
“FAKE NEWS.” “The phony Witch Hunt.” And “a big hoax.” President Donald J. Trump has publicly used these phrases to describe the now-debunked allegations that he colluded with the Russians to win the 2016 presidential election.
As noted in the President’s complaint, Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Attorney General William Barr, the House of Representatives’ Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and the United States Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence all concluded “there was no evidence of collusion between President Trump, the Trump Campaign, and Russia.”
In other words, as the President asserts, “[t]he Russia Collusion Hoax was dead, at least until Defendants [as members of the Pulitzer Prize board] attempted to resurrect it” by conspiring to publish a defamatory statement falsely implying that the President colluded with the Russians.
I join the unanimous majority opinion because I agree that Florida’s long-arm statute and the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause allow for the exercise of personal jurisdiction over the non-resident defendants for their alleged roles in conspiring to issue the defamatory statement standing by the debunked allegations that the President colluded with the Russians.
But I write separately to address the merits of the President’s defamation and conspiracy claims because the nonresident defendants challenge them here by arguing that they are not actionable under Florida’s long-arm statute. Thus, the merits of the President’s claims are crucial to our jurisdictional analysis and will be addressed in this opinion.
[…]
For a statement to be actionable in defamation, it must be one of fact or mixed opinion rather than simply a statement of pure opinion.
[…]
The statement here was actionable as one of fact because it detailed both the procedure the Pulitzer Prize board members followed to conclude that they would not rescind the 2018 Pulitzer Prizes in National Reporting and the reasoning for not rescinding the awards.
The statement described “[a]n actual or alleged event or circumstance[,]” with the board members vouching for the truth of facts that had been debunked after thorough investigation, thereby rendering it a statement of fact. To the extent any part of the statement could be considered opinion in form or context, the statement was nonetheless actionable as a mixed opinion with implied facts.
Furthermore, the statement constitutes defamation by implication because, as the complaint asserted, despite the fact that “[t]he awarded organizations had reported the individual components of the Russia Collusion Hoax all wrong[,]” which “were exposed as utter fiction[,]” the Pulitzer board members published a statement falsely implying that these facts were true by stating that two independent reviews conducted by individuals at their request concluded “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.”
In other words, the board members vouched for the truth of reporting that had been debunked by all credible sources charged with investigating the false claim that the President colluded with the Russians to win the 2016 presidential election, including Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Attorney General William Barr, the House of Representatives’ Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and the United States Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence.
Therefore, because the statement at issue was one of fact or mixed opinion, and constitutes a claim for defamation by implication, Florida’s long-arm statute allows for the exercise of jurisdiction.
The Pulitzer Prize Board issued the following statement to Fox News: “This lawsuit is about intimidation of the press and those who support it—and we will not be intimidated. The Pulitzer Board will continue to recognize the accomplishments of journalists, writers, artists and composers at the highest level. We look forward to continuing our defense of journalism.”
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