In 2018, Pulitzer Prizes were awarded to journalists who helped promote since-discredited claims that President Donald Trump's campaign colluded with the Russian government.

Trump responded by filing a defamation suit against the Pulitzer Board, a move which the Florida Supreme Court has said can go forward. 

Case won't be delayed until Trump leaves office

According to Just the News, state Supreme Court justices rejected the Pulitzer Board's argument that Trump's lawsuit should be delayed until he leaves office.

"This cause having heretofore been submitted to the Court on jurisdictional briefs and portions of the record deemed necessary to reflect jurisdiction under Article V, Section 3(b), Florida Constitution, and the Court having determined that it should decline to accept jurisdiction, it is ordered that the petition for review is denied," this week's ruling read.

Florida's highest judicial body then went on to assert that "[n]o motion for rehearing will be entertained by the Court."

State Supreme Court justices affirm lower court rulings

Just the News noted that the decision affirms earlier rulings made by trial Judge Robert Pegg as well as the Florida Fourth District Court of Appeals.

In the 14-page decision Pegg issued last year, he rejected the Pulitzer Board's claim that Trump's case should be rejected on the grounds that its statements constituted "pure opinion."

"While true that a pure opinion statement cannot form the basis for a defamation action, a statement that implies or includes undisclosed defamatory facts as the basis for the opinion is actionable," Pegg wrote.

Trump wins round in libel suit against Pulitzer Prize Board over Russia stories https://t.co/MMFY8zBqvk

— POLITICO (@politico) July 21, 2024

Politico noted how Trump reacted favorably to Pegg's decision, hailing him as an "esteemed" figure in a post made to Truth Social.

Pulitzer Board doubled down on prize awards

For its part, the Pulitzer Board released a statement in 2022 which doubled down on granting awards for Trump-Russia stories.

"In the last three years, the Pulitzer Board has received inquiries, including from former President Donald Trump, about submissions from The New York Times and The Washington Post on Russian interference in the U.S. election and its connections to the Trump campaign--submissions that jointly won the 2018 National Reporting prize," it read.

"These inquiries prompted the Pulitzer Board to commission two independent reviews of the work submitted by those organizations to our National Reporting competition. Both reviews were conducted by individuals with no connection to the institutions whose work was under examination, nor any connection to each other," the statement continued.

"The separate reviews converged in their conclusions: 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," it went on to add.