President Donald Trump’s defamation suit against the Pulitzer Prize Board has reached the discovery phase.
The board is demanding a “complete and unredacted copy of the Mueller Report” after Trump sued the organization for refusing to revoke the award given to the Washington Post and New York Times for their Russiagate stories. The outlets received the coveted prize for their “deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage” in 2018, which Trump claims was defamatory and caused him reputational harm.
In 2022, the president officially filed a lawsuit against the Pulitzer Prize Board after a statement was released fully backing up the awards, and rejecting his formal demands to rescind them:
The Pulitzer Prize Board has an established, formal process by which complaints against winning entries are carefully reviewed. 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.
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 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.
The 2018 Pulitzer Prizes in National Reporting stand.
Trump believes that the stories “damaged” his “reputation, profession, and business,” by “wrongfully impl[ying] criminal, wrongful, and un-American conduct.” He claims that the Pulitzer Prize lends the power of a “pinnacle of American journalistic achievement” to the “Russia collusion delusion” conspiracy theory pushed by leftists during his first term.
Mueller’s report did not find any collusion between members of the Trump campaign in Russia, but did note “numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign.”
“Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities,” the report reads.
Law&Crime broke down the discovery demand made by the board, and what it could mean for the case moving forward.
“The latest discovery demands from the defendants — reminiscent of litigation that several years ago pressed a federal judge to evaluate whether the DOJ during Trump’s first term improperly redacted the Mueller report and “distorted” its findings to steer a narrative — come at a time when the current Trump administration has supported burying and relegating to the “dustbin of history” ex-special counsel Jack Smith’s volume on the Mar-a-Lago classified documents investigation,” the outlet reported.
“The board members stated their document and communications request ‘includes but is not limited to […] any negotiation’ with Mueller regarding Trump’s records production or his ‘answers to written questions,’ Russia’s 2016 hack of the DNC and the ensuing WikiLeaks dump, information on the Trump Tower Moscow project, Donald Trump Jr.’s 2016 Trump Tower meeting, and more.”
Writers and editors can be contacted at [email protected] with feedback, tips, or corrections.
Sierra Marlee is a millennial whose hunger for the truth in a world of fake news has led her to write. Marlee also contributes to BizPac Review.
- Dramatic pro-life Super Bowl commercial will be seen by millions - February 7, 2026
- Team USA figure skater using Winter Olympics platform to fight for ‘queer’ human rights under Trump - February 7, 2026
- Natasha Owens drops sizzlin’ hot anti-Springsteen anthem: ‘Thank God you’re not the boss’ - February 7, 2026
Comment
We have no tolerance for comments containing violence, racism, profanity, vulgarity, doxing, or discourteous behavior. If a comment is spam, instead of replying to it please click the ∨ icon below and to the right of that comment. Thank you for partnering with us to maintain fruitful conversation.