The Pulitzer Prize Board is asking a judge to pause a defamation case filed by President Donald Trump against it until his presidency is over. In their motion, the board is using Trump’s own legal arguments against him, pointing out that he has previously sought stays in other civil lawsuits while he was in office.
Trump sued the Pulitzer Board in 2022 after it released a statement standing by its awarding of the 2018 national reporting prize to the Washington Post and New York Times for their coverage of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its alleged connections to the Trump campaign.
The Pulitzer Board argues that Trump’s own team has requested stays in other cases, citing the need for the president to devote his time and energy to America’s problems. The board also notes that Trump made the same argument during his first term in a defamation case brought against him by Summer Zervos, a former contestant on his show “The Apprentice.”
The board argues that the stay benefits Trump because the prize-winning articles concern his official actions during his first term, and discovery will need to probe those actions. For years, Trump demanded that the Pulitzer Board rescind the 2018 prize, arguing that he had been exonerated by special counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 report.
Following Trump’s demands, the Pulitzer Board commissioned two independent reviews of the awards, issuing a statement in 2022 that read in part: “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.” It was that statement that prompted Trump to file his defamation suit against the board, choosing to file it in Florida because one member of the board is a Florida resident.
