Florida Appeals Court Unanimously Rejects Pulitzer Prize’s Motion to Dismiss Trump’s Lawsuit

President Trump filed a suit against the fake award board known as the Pulitzer Prize for awarding fake Pulitzers to fake news propagandists. This week the Florida Appeals Court unanimously refused to dismiss the case. This is just one more victory in a long line of victories for President Trump, and it keeps his defamation suit against the Pulitzer awards alive. 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 actual Russian Collusion hoax was not based on evidence but was a tool used by Hillary Clinton and her campaign to keep her from humiliation. The conspiracy failed, and Hillary was humiliated. Despite that proof, the Pulitzer committee refused to claw back their awards from the fake media recipients. The court recognized this as defamation for trying to prop up the Democrats’ lies.

From The Gateway Pundit

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.

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.