Let’s start with this, because that’s also where it ends.
“Trump has long used the courts to go after his opponents and to get attention for his own claims. It’s a pattern that goes back decades before his presidency<” The Hill reported on Wednesday, December 14, 2022 (read story here).
By the way, it’s worth mentioning that while still a candidate in 2016, Trump said he wanted to change America’s libel laws “so reporters could be sued more easily for negative stories” (see story here). That’s right, he wanted to be able to sue critics, whether their criticism was true or not.
His latest target is the Pulitzer Board, and his complaint is they declined to revoke the Pulitzer Prizes awarded in 2018 to the New York Times and Washington Post for their reporting on Russian interference in the 2016 election.
This will go nowhere. Truth is never libelous. The Russians did interfere in the 2016 election, and Trump’s campaign gleefully took all the Russian help they could get. The New York Times said, “Our journalists thoroughly pursued credible claims, fact-checked, edited and ultimately produced groundbreaking journalism that was proven true time and again.”
But even if the newspapers got some elements of the story wrong, Trump would still have to prove actual malice — probably twice over. First, he’d have to prove the errors were knowing and malicious; and second, he’d also have to prove the Pulitzer Board awarded the Pulitzer Prices knowing the reporting was false, and did it with malice. And claiming isn’t proving.
Ain’t gonna happen. The only question up in the air is whether the judge will impose “frivolous lawsuit” sanctions and make Trump’s attorneys pay the Board’s legal defense costs under Rule 11.