President Trump scored yet another legal victory on Wednesday as he continues to hold news organizations accountable for failing to report the truth. The latest win comes in the form of an appellate court in Florida unanimously affirming a trial court order denying the Pulitzer Prize Board's motion to dismiss a lawsuit brought forth by the president.

Trump filed the lawsuit in 2022 over the panel’s award for “Russian collusion” stories pushed by the New York Times and Washington Post. 

Judge Ed Artau, in his written concurrence, affirmed that the trial court had jurisdiction over the defendants but also concluded that the statement at the heart of the lawsuit is, in fact, actionable. 

The lawsuit contends that the awards were based on a “demonstrably false connection” that “was and remains the stated basis” for stories run by the Post and the Times regarding collusion.

Trump scores ‘unequivocal victory’ against Pulitzer Prize board members, court denies request to dismiss suit https://t.co/Q21h7JCmos

— Fox News (@FoxNews) February 13, 2025

Artau notes that numerous entities had squashed the Russia collusion narrative. But the Pulitzer Prize Board, in defiantly issuing a statement refusing to rescind the awards for reporting based more on fantasy than reality, further pushed the assertion of collusion.

"As noted in the President’s complaint, Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Attorney General William Barr, the House of Representatives’ Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and the United States Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence all concluded ‘there was no evidence of collusion between President Trump, the Trump Campaign, and Russia,'" he wrote in a filing obtained by Fox News Digital.

"In other words, as the President asserts, ‘[t]he Russia Collusion Hoax was dead, at least until Defendants [as members of the Pulitzer Prize board] attempted to resurrect it’ by conspiring to publish a defamatory statement falsely implying that the President colluded with the Russians."

In their motion to dismiss, the Board had asserted that their statement defending the awards was purely opinion and not actionable. Artau, however, points out that they injected claims of fact.

"The board members vouched for the truth of reporting that had been debunked by all credible sources charged with investigating the false claim that the President colluded with the Russians to win the 2016 presidential election," he wrote.

Artau states that President Trump met the burden of establishing jurisdiction for the trial court and can therefore "proceed with his asserted claims that the non-resident defendants acted with actual malice or reckless disregard for the truth."

Pulitzer Prize Committee Loses Motion in Trump Defamation Suit, Must Provide Discovery Documents

Trump's attorney, Quincy Bird, issued a statement to Fox celebrating the latest legal victory.

"Today’s ruling is an unequivocal victory for President Trump in his pursuit of justice against the Pulitzer Prize board members for their dishonest and defamatory conduct," said Bird.

"President Trump is committed to holding those who traffic in fake news, lies, and smears to account, and he looks forward to seeing his powerful cases through to a just conclusion."

POTUS winning lawsuits left and right. Here’s another. His suit against the Pulitzer board can proceed.https://t.co/1PEsSrNHHg

— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) February 13, 2025

Trump's lawsuit claimed that “a large swath of Americans had a tremendous misunderstanding of the truth” because the Times and the Post pushed “the Russia Collusion Hoax.”

And, as the narrative “dominated the media,” those newspapers were, according to the lawsuit, “rewarded for lying to the American public.”

The New York Times and the Washington Post were jointly awarded the Pulitzer for their 2017 coverage of former President Trump and his alleged ties to Russian operatives during the 2016 presidential campaign. In doing so, the Board celebrated the newspapers for their “deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage … of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign … and his eventual administration.”

There were no connections.

Still, the Pulitzer Prize Board issued a statement in 2022 insisting that none of the articles used as the basis for the awards “were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes.”

Trump's lawsuit countered that assertion, noting explicitly how the Washington Post had “retracted statements from several articles from 2017 relating to the Steele Dossier and other alleged connections between the Trump campaign and Russia.”

Indeed, the Post quietly edited two major articles that relied on the discredited Steele dossier and added editor’s notes to at least 14 other reports.

OUR BAD: Washington Post Corrects ‘Dozens of Articles’ Related to Debunked Steele Dossier https://t.co/a0obLnicuJ

— Sean Hannity 🇺🇸 (@seanhannity) November 18, 2021

The amended articles ranged from 2017 to 2019 – nearly three years’ worth of reporting that remained published on the Washington Post website for many months with false information.

At the time, Axios called for media reckoning over the false reporting on the Steele dossier.

“It’s one of the most egregious journalistic errors in modern history,” they wrote, but “the media’s response to its own mistakes has so far been tepid.”

They published false stories, were rewarded for their efforts, quietly walked those stories back, and the board refused to admit their mistakes.

This latest lawsuit being allowed to move forward is another in a long line of recent victories in holding the media accountable. 

The president recently secured a settlement in his lawsuit against ABC News. Additionally, a jury found CNN liable for defamation and acting with malice in relation to a false news report. 

In a separate legal action, the producers of "60 Minutes" handed over interview transcripts with Kamala Harris to the FCC, stemming from another of Trump's lawsuits concerning alleged election interference.

Media outlets are finally being held accountable for their reporting. Legal actions and settlements underscore a new era of scrutiny and responsibility in journalism.