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A Florida appeals court Wednesday rejected a request to put on hold a defamation lawsuit that President Donald Trump filed against Pulitzer Prize board members. The ruling by a three-judge panel of the 4th District Court of Appeal said the board members argued they were entitled to a stay of the lawsuit that would avoid the “constitutional conflicts arising from allowing respondent (Trump) to proceed as a plaintiff in a state court civil action on claims that may involve his official conduct as the president.” But the appeals court focused on the fact Trump was not seeking a stay. “When the president is a willing participant, courts do not risk improperly interfering with the essential functioning of government,” said the seven-page opinion, written by Chief Judge Mark Klingensmith and joined by Judges Martha Warner and Melanie May. “The president — by virtue of his exceptional position — is uniquely equipped to determine how to use his time, to assess the attention a lawsuit will require, and to decide whether the lawsuit will divert him from his official business. When an officeholder chooses to initiate litigation, courts must assume the officeholder already has weighed the burdens on their official duties.” Trump filed the lawsuit in 2022 in Okeechobee County, contending that he was defamed by a statement posted online by the Pulitzer board. That statement came after Trump requested that the board rescind a joint 2018 award to The New York Times and The Washington Post for reporting about alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election. The 4th District Court of Appeal in February also refused to dismiss the lawsuit against Pulitzer board members and other people associated with the board who live outside of Florida. Wednesday’s opinion did not detail the underlying issues in the case. But the February ruling said the Pulitzer board commissioned two independent reviews of the Times and Post stories and declined to rescind the award decision. The disputed board statement, which was later posted online, said in part that the “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.”
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