Lawyers for President Donald Trump earlier this week rejected Pulitzer Prize board members” attempt to halt his defamation lawsuit over 2018 Washington Post and New York Times Russia probe reporting awards, calling the defendants’ request for a yearslong stay an “analytically confused and wrong” bid to cling to immunity that belongs to the chief executive alone.

The brief, filed Monday on the Florida Supreme Court’s docket, asked the Sunshine State’s top court to jettison for lack of jurisdiction the petition of Andrew W. Mellon Foundation President Elizabeth Alexander and The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, among more than a dozen other board members named in Trump’s suit.

According to attorneys with the firm Weber, Crabb, & Wein, P.A., the petitioner-defendants’ call for a stay until Trump’s second term ends was legally “wrong” — and just as “ludicrous” was their “assertion that they commissioned two independent reviews” of the challenged Russia probe reporting, “which somehow concluded that none of the reporting had been discredited by later disclosures.”

Recall that a state judge in July 2024 refused to throw out Trump’s defamation conspiracy lawsuit, finding that a 2022 statement standing by 2017 New York Times and Washington Post reporting on special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe was “actionable mixed opinion” and that the former president’s claims were “properly pled.”

When Trump first filed the lawsuit in 2022, he sought to hold the Pulitzer board member defendants liable for the following statement that backed awards for Russia probe reporting and pointed to independent reviews of the coverage to rebuff the then-private citizen’s demands to rescind the prizes:

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 board members’ attorneys offered up that same defense as recently as last month in a brief before the Supreme Court of Florida, writing that the “twenty award-winning articles […] reported facts that Respondent has never contested, and none of the Articles has since been retracted or corrected.”

Trump lawyers have now responded by calling that “ludicrous.”

“In their Statement of the Case and Facts, Petitioners stray far beyond the facts stated in the district court’s opinion. They even falsely pretend that President Trump has never contested the articles published by The New York Times and The Washington Post maliciously and wrongly asserting that his campaign colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election,” the brief said, adding that the board members “are not entitled to their own version of reality.”

From here, Trump’s legal team took aim at the issue raised by the board members.

According to the petitioner-defendants, there’s a legitimate unanswered question of whether the Constitution “permits a sitting President to proceed with a civil lawsuit in state court over claims implicating his official conduct, or whether the Constitution requires the state court to stay such litigation until the President’s term in office concludes.”

In May, Trump saw Florida’s Fourth District Court of Appeal reject the board members’ arguments that the president’s defamation lawsuit had to be halted until he was out of office, under the notion that if Trump can claim immunity from a burdensome suit during his term the defendants should be able to protect their due process rights through a stay — especially considering that the allegedly offending reporting regarded “official acts” from his first term.

“Petitioners effectively ask that the court invoke a temporary immunity under the Supremacy Clause on [Trump’s] behalf to stay this civil proceeding, even though [Trump] has not sought such relief,” the appellate court explained. “They further allege that it would violate due process to allow [Trump] to claim constitutional entitlement to stay cases because of his office but not allow them the same ability.”

“But such privileges are afforded to the President alone, not to his litigation adversaries,” the appellate court added, dubbing Trump a “willing participant” that is “uniquely equipped to determine how to use his time” and has not invoked immunity.

Though the petitioner-defendants have maintained that this issue is “vitally important, because allowing a case to proceed would necessarily subject the President to direct control by a state court judge” while also jeopardizing their due process rights, Trump’s attorneys ripped these contentions as “analytically confused and wrong.”

“Petitioners claim a stay is required until President Trump leaves office because the 2017 Pulitzer Prize-winning articles reported on ‘official acts,’ thus placing them in issue. Setting aside that Petitioners are being sued for their conduct occurring in 2022 when President Trump was not in office, their ‘official acts’ argument confuses two distinct Article II immunities,” the brief said. “‘Official acts’ immunity is a substantive defense that applies regardless of whether the President is in office at the time of litigation. By contrast, the kind of immunity improperly invoked by Petitioners is designed to protect a sitting President from the unique burdens of defending unwelcome lawsuits during his tenure.”

In closing, Trump lawyers asked the state high court to simply affirm that the appellate court was right to rule “based on long-settled precedent regarding standing, and not on any construction of a provision of the U.S. Constitution.” The appellate court decided that the board members lacked standing to raise concerns about Trump’s own suit burdening his “Presidential duties” because “generally, one cannot assert someone else’s constitutional rights.”

Taken together, that means the Florida Supreme Court doesn’t have jurisdiction to hear a petition rooted in “speculative concerns of potential harms that [the board members] themselves will never suffer,” the Trump brief said.