President Donald Trump racked up his latest legal victory in Florida on Monday, after a state judge ruled the Pulitzer Prize board’s internal communications are fair game for discovery in a lawsuit Trump filed over the awards the board gave the New York Times and Washington Post in 2018 for their coverage of Russiagate.
Judge Robert L. Pegg, a circuit court judge in Okeechobee County, declined the board’s request to shield its internal communications from the lawsuit’s discovery phase. Trump sued the board in 2022 over its award to the Times and Post four years earlier for a series of stories that the board said “dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections” to Trump.
In his lawsuit, Trump said the board “rewarded” the newspapers “for lying to the American public” about the “now-debunked theory” that he conspired with Russia to influence the election. A series of federal investigations found no evidence that Trump colluded with the Kremlin.
Pegg rejected a motion by the board to avoid handing over internal deliberations about the award, saying the board failed to show that the discovery process will create “annoyance, embarrassment, oppression, or undue burden or expense,” according to the ruling, first reported by Fox News.