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Using Trump’s own legal arguments, Pulitzer Board seeks stay of Trump defamation case while he’s in office

<i>Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images via CNN Newsource</i><br/>US President Donald Trump speaks to reporters after signing a series of executive orders in the Oval Office of the White House on January 23 in Washington
Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images via CNN Newsource
US President Donald Trump speaks to reporters after signing a series of executive orders in the Oval Office of the White House on January 23 in Washington

By Hadas Gold, CNN

(CNN) — The Pulitzer Prize board is asking a judge to hit pause on a defamation case President Donald Trump filed against it until his presidency is over, using Trump’s own legal arguments against him.

Trump sued the Pulitzer Board in 2022 after it released a statement standing by awarding the 2018 national reporting prize to the Washington Post and New York Times for their coverage of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its alleged connections to the Trump campaign.

In their motion filed on Monday, the Pulitzer Board pointed out that Trump previously sought stays in other civil lawsuits where he was the defendant, saying the suits should be halted while he is in office because of questions of whether the US Constitution bars state courts from exercising jurisdiction over the a sitting president.

This past Friday, the motion notes, Trump’s team requested a stay in a case investors in Trump’s social media company brought against him. In that case, Trump’s team argued “(c)ommonsense favors a stay of this case until the end of the President’s term,” so that “President Trump can devote his time and energies to America’s problems.”

Trump made the same argument during his first term in a defamation case brought against him by Summer Zervos, a former contestant on his show “The Apprentice.”

“Specifically, in his first term Plaintiff argued that if a case pending against him in New York state court was not ‘temporarily stayed, it will disrupt and impair [his] ability to discharge his Article II responsibilities,’ and he declared that ‘the effective administration of our nation provides a compelling justification to stay [the] action,’” the Pulitzer Board’s motion states.

The board also argues that the stay benefits the president, because the “prize-winning articles concern – and discovery will thus need to probe – Plaintiff’s official actions during his first term.”

For years, Trump demanded the Pulitzer Board rescind the 2018 prize, arguing that he had been exonerated by special counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 report. The report said it “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in the election interference activities,” although it did not completely clear Trump of wrongdoing.

Following Trump’s demands, the Pulitzer Board commissioned two independent reviews of the awards, issuing a statement in 2022 that read in part: “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 was that statement that prompted Trump to file his defamation suit against the board, choosing to file it in Florida because one member of the board is a Florida resident.

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