Judge Rejects Bid to Dismiss Trump Libel Suit Against Pulitzer Board

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A state judge in Florida has given former President Donald J. Trump a legal victory, refusing to toss a libel lawsuit filed by Mr. Trump over a statement made by the board of the Pulitzer Prizes on coverage of the 2016 Trump campaign’s connections to Russia. The ruling on Saturday by Robert Pegg, a senior judge on a circuit court in Florida, means that Mr. Trump’s case will proceed, opening the door to a discovery phase that may allow Mr. Trump’s lawyers to question Pulitzer officials, who issue the most prestigious prizes in journalism. The case hinges on a statement made in 2022 by the panel reaffirming its decision to award the national reporting prize in 2018 to The New York Times and The Washington Post for their coverage of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and Russian ties to the Trump campaign. After the prize was awarded, a special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, investigating the Russian interference allegations, said he could find no evidence that Mr. Trump or his aides had coordinated with the interference effort. Mr. Trump and others who disputed the reporting had urged the Pulitzer Prize Board to revoke the award, but in its 2022 statement, the Pulitzer Prize board said two independent reviews had found nothing to discredit the articles. The reviews found 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 said in the statement.