I may have to take up popcorn again

Donald Trump scored a significant court win Saturday as a state judge in Florida turned down attempts by the Pulitzer Prize Board to toss out a libel lawsuit Trump filed in 2022 relating to a series of reports in the New York Times and Washington Post on the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.

In a 14-page ruling issued Saturday, Senior Judge Robert Pegg turned down arguments from the prominent journalism awards panel that their decision to bestow the national reporting prize on the staffs of the two newspapers in 2018 amounted to a statement of “pure opinion” rather than fact.

The libel suit does not hinge directly on the articles the Times and Post published about the Trump campaign’s links to Russia or on the decision to award the Pulitzer to the newspapers.

Instead, the case focuses on the board’s decision in 2022 to publicly reaffirm those awards despite repeated complaints by Trump that the the stories contained numerous falsehoods and were undermined by the findings of special counsel Robert Mueller’s two-year investigation into those issues.

Trump appears to have zeroed in on the board’s 2022 statement about the reviews it ordered of the earlier prizes because Florida law has a two-year statute of limitations for defamation cases.

This means the Trump team now has right to discovery.