Allow me to put my most sympathetic reaction to the Walter Duranty Prize Board's predicament in text form: Bwa-hahahahahahaha.

This saga starts with the Pulitzer Prize board's refusal to withdraw the awards it granted the New York Times and Washington Post in 2018 for their coverage of what turned out to be a hoax about Trump's supposed collusion with Russia. A special counsel investigation later showed no evidence for that claim, and even later developments identified it as a Hillary Clinton campaign dirty trick that was weaponized by the Barack Obama administration. When Trump demanded a retraction of the awards, the Pulitzer board instead issued a statement standing by the awards and the reporting, claiming to have conducted independent reviews that substantiated both.

Trump then sued for defamation under Florida law within that declaration. The Pulitzer board then moved for summary dismissal, but the judge threw that motion out last summer. The Pulitzer board appealed that decision, but yesterday the appellate court shot that down as well, although not on the merits:

The board argued that moving forward with the lawsuit “would now raise constitutional concerns for this court — or any other state court — to exercise ‘direct control’ over” Trump during his presidency. The motion to stay cited the supremacy and take care clauses of the U.S. Constitution in service of this argument.

“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 summarized. “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.”

In essence, the Pulitzer board wanted to assert executive privilege, which the court found perplexing. The board raised this in the context of the president himself, and then again in the context of lesser executive officials. As the appellant court points out, however, the Pulitzer board is none of the above:

On the specific question of constitutional privileges, the court notes the president has even more than the board cites in their motion.

“But such privileges are afforded to the President alone, not to his litigation adversaries,” the appellate court muses. ...

“While government officials may claim the immunities and protections provided to them in court proceedings, the law is clear that such privileges are not available to third parties to claim, nor may such privileges be asserted by others on the officials’ behalf,” the opinion goes on. “The principle of standing says that, generally, one cannot assert someone else’s constitutional rights. Immunities and privileges, by their very nature, inure solely to the benefit of the individual for whom they are intended. Thus, application of a governmental immunity cannot be asserted by the Petitioners as private citizens.”

Talk about desperation. Why would the Pulitzer board try to get out of a trial with a claim of executive privilege? Are they that afraid of losing at trial? They should be, given what Senior Judge Robert Pegg had to say in his ruling on their initial motion for dismissal. Pegg made it pretty clear that the evidence looks pretty convincing that not only does Trump have enough of a case to proceed to trial, the evidence strongly suggests that the Pulitzer board may get a Walter Duranty prize of its own:

The Zambrano court also found an “important factor in the process of analyzing a comment is determining whether the speaker accurately presented the underlying facts of the situation before making the allegedly defamatory remarks.” Id. If the defendant “neglects to provide the audience with an adequate factual foundation prior to engaging in the offending discourse, liability may arise.” Id. at 606-07 (collecting cases). 

This Court is bound by the Fourth District’s opinion in Zambrano, and as a result finds the alleged defamatory statement to be actionable. Defendants cannot claim the statement is pure opinion when they withheld information from their audience that would have provided an adequate factual foundation for a common reader to decide whether to agree or disagree with Defendants’ decision to let 2018 Pulitzer Prizes in National Reporting stand, and whether the awarded reporting had in fact been discredited by facts that emerged from the Mueller Report or the other government investigations that had been made public since the conferral of those prizes.

Pegg then goes on to list seven examples of withheld factual claims in the Pulitzer statement, which suggested but failed to document factual bases for their claim about the reporting on Trump. Most of these have to do with the ambiguous representations of supposedly expert reviews of the issue by the Pulitzer board that purportedly reaffirmed the veracity of both the reporting and the award announcements. Pegg noted that this likely misled readers into assuming that the defamatory claims about Trump had been verified, even well after they had all been debunked. That falls outside the protections of "opinion" under Zambrano, Pegg ruled:

In sum, if the Defendants’ Statement had included the foregoing facts, an ordinary reader might have been able to evaluate whether they agreed with Defendants’ decision not to revoke the prizes, and whether the underlying reporting had actually survived the factual disclosures of several subsequent government investigations unscathed. Instead, the alleged defamatory statement implies no fewer than seven undisclosed sets of foundational facts, making the Defendants’ Statement actionable mixed opinion. See Zambrano, 484 So.2d at 606. 

Moreover, the statement at issue does not contain any cautionary language or attribution to an identifiable source, factors that militate toward actionability. See Smith, 443 So. 2d at 1047; Zambrano, 484 So. 2d at 606-07. Readers cannot meaningfully evaluate Defendants’ decision to accredit the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting when an adequate factual foundation for this decision has been withheld. Defendants’ argument that the Defendants’ Statement is “pure opinion” fails, and this Court finds the Defendants’ Statement to be actionable.

To simplify this: had the Pulitzers just said, "We believe the NYT and WaPo" and stopped there, that would have been opinion and not actionable under defamation. By claiming to have conducted their own review of the reporting and the awards and then representing that they were factually correct, the Pulitzer board was making a factual claim rather than publishing a pure opinion. That's more than enough to take this to trial, Pegg ruled in July 2024:

In this case, President Trump has pled that the Defendants’ Statement left readers with the false, defamatory message that the Awarded Articles, which advanced the Russia Collusion Hoax, “had been objectively, thoroughly, and independently reviewed for veracity twice, and that the separate conclusions of these had each accredited the accuracy of the award recipients’ reporting.” See Am. Compl. at ¶ 146 (emphasis in original). In other words, President Trump has alleged the Defendants’ Statement conveyed the false, defamatory message that he had colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election. At this stage of the litigation, President Trump has sufficiently pled defamation per se.

That argument must have been solid enough that the Pulitzer board and its attorneys didn't challenge it head-on. Instead, they asked the appellate court to apply executive privilege to boot this case to 2029, which the court has now laughed off. They could take this to Florida's supreme court, but the outcome likely won't change. Either the corrupt Pulitzer board will have to try to settle the case with Trump or risk a very expensive beating in a trial on Trump's home turf.

Somewhere, in a happier place than this one, Gareth Jones must be smiling. I know I am.