The MeidasTouch Podcast - Vexatious Litigant Donald Trump files FRIVOLOUS lawsuit against Pulitzer Prize Board

Episode Date: December 15, 2022

Donald Trump just filed a frivolous lawsuit against the Pulitzer Prize Board. MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas reports. Shop Meidas Merch at: https://store.meidastouch.com Join us on Patreon: https://patreon.com/meidastouch Remember to subscribe to ALL the Meidas Media Podcasts: MeidasTouch: https://pod.link/1510240831 Legal AF: https://pod.link/1580828595 The PoliticsGirl Podcast: https://pod.link/1595408601 The Influence Continuum: https://pod.link/1603773245 Kremlin File: https://pod.link/1575837599 Mea Culpa with Michael Cohen: https://pod.link/1530639447 The Weekend Show: https://pod.link/1612691018 The Tony Michaels Podcast: https://pod.link/1561049560 American Psyop: https://pod.link/1652143101 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. I'm Ben Micellis from the Midas Touch Network. This is one of the most bizarre things I have reported on. Donald Trump has filed the most frivolous lawsuit yet. This lawsuit that he filed is against the Pulitzer Prize board for defamation because Donald Trump alleges that the Pulitzer Prize board defamed him by providing the Pulitzer Prize award to the New York Times and the Washington Post in 2018 for their coverage of Donald Trump's links to Russia and those in Trump's inner circles' links to Russia. When I first heard about this, I said, this can't possibly be real. Because short of the lawsuit involving space aliens coming down

and causing injury, which of course is an absurd proposition, but you could imagine the courts from time to time getting just completely deranged and wacky lawsuits. This is kind of right up there with it. I mean, Donald Trump has just completely lost his mind at this stage. I mean, I could try to break down this lawsuit for you. I'll try to. But this is what Donald Trump actually alleges in this complaint. I'll just quote from it.

He goes, while elements at both the awarded articles understood at the time they were propagating political disinformation manufactured by paid sources in an attempt to mislead the public and tarnish President Trump's reputation and the political prospects. The lawsuit goes on to say, what matters instead is the defendant's conduct. They're referring to the board of the Pulitzer Prize. What matters instead is the defendant's conduct, particularly when many of the key assertions and premises of the Russia collusion hoax that permeated the awarded articles had been revealed by the Mueller report and congressional investigations as false after the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in national reporting had been awarded. I truly hope the lawyers who filed this lose their license. I truly hope. This is the biggest waste of time, the biggest abuse of our legal system,

the most deranged. I would say it's laughable, it's comical, but Donald Trump is propagating disinformation here, doing it intentionally, utilizing our court system to do that. He's going to lose the case. He's going to eventually get sanctioned for this. I have a great degree of confidence for that. But let's talk about how the news of this lawsuit spread. And generally, this is a tactic that's always been utilized by Trump. And the tactic is he files a completely ridiculous, absurd, and sanctionable lawsuit. He essentially loses all of his cases. And not only does he lose his cases, his lawyers usually get sanctioned. He's usually found in contempt. I mean, just recently we learned that he was held in contempt, the Trump organization was, in the New York criminal trial. He was held in contempt in the New York attorney general's

civil investigation of the Trump organization's fraud. They were held in civil contempt there. They were just sanctioned by a judge in the Southern District of Florida. The first set of sanctions against Trump's lawyer, Alina Haba, for filing a completely frivolous lawsuit back in March of 2022. By the way, that March of 2022 federal case in the Southern District of Florida, that was a RICO and racketeering lawsuit alleging these conspiracies between like 40 or so individuals named as defendants, including Hillary Clinton and other people, and they didn't even get the people's titles right or even where they lived, yet alone a basic, accurate, factual recitation, yet alone actually assert any claims as all.

Literally, when the judge sanctioned Trump recently or sanctioned Trump's lawyer recently in that case in the Southern District of Florida, the judge basically said, you didn't file a case. You just literally put Trump's ranting and ravings on pieces of paper and submitted it to the court. Like every single statement, not just one, every single statement here was false. And it wasn't just false because you're a horrible lawyer. Like you were intentionally providing all of this false and completely deranged information to the court with the intent to deceive is essentially what the Southern District of Florida wrote. So he's getting sanctioned. He's losing all of his cases. To mention the 2020 cases where he lost literally

every election case that he filed. They were just based on complete and utter conspiracies. But the tactic is you file the lawsuit, then you give it to Fox so that Fox can give you the headline that you want. And that's what happened here. So he files the lawsuit and the Fox headline is, Trump files defamation suit against members of Pulitzer Prize board for defending debunked Russiagate honors. Complaint says, New York Times washington post were rewarded for lying to the american public and it's written by this guy brian flood this is all part of the strategy

then who picks this up next oh it's the new york post i guess just another journalistic outlet is pulling it up no owned by the exact same people that own Fox. They're both owned by Murdoch. So then New York Post does their article and they write, Trump sues Pulitzer Prize board for defamation for awarding Washington Post and New York Times, Russiagate coverage. It's different. It's written by another author. So now what happens? Because the large media networks outside of the New York Post and Fox News are lazy and they both sides issues and don't care, what we are going to see happen is a bunch of headlines that just regurgitate this headline, that Trump files a defamation suit. He's alleging that the Pulitzer Prize board

defamed him. And that just becomes the headline. They very rarely, if ever, report when Trump loses and Trump gets sanctioned. Apparently that's not sexy enough news for large media networks to report on. So all that gets reported is the headline. And then what does Donald Trump do? Well, he then uses these headlines. He will send emails and messages to the cult followers who he grifts from. He will ask them to donate money right now

to help him fight and to look at what these articles are. He'll raise hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars very quickly so that if he does get sanctioned, it covers the fees of his sanction because that's ultimately what he wants to protect against anyway. And he plays that scheme over and over again. And large media networks don't hold him accountable. What the headline should be is exactly what our headline is here on the Midas Touch Network.

That's why we do it differently than what the large media networks do. That's why more people watch us here on the Midas Touch Network than watch large media anymore because large media has basically disqualified itself based on the behavior I just discussed. But you call this out. You go, vexatious litigant, Trump,

files frivolous, bizarre, deranged lawsuit against Pulitzer asserting ridiculous conspiracy theories. That is what the title should reflect, or some variation of that, not to give any credence to this absurdity whatsoever. Suppose we can talk briefly about the Pulitzer Prize for a second, because Donald Trump is obsessed with the Pulitzer Prize. So the Pulitzer Prize, the concept of it, was created when a media baron from 1917, Joseph Pulitzer, put in his will an endowment to Columbia University to basically provide these awards, the Pulitzer Prize, to journalists for achievement in newspapers and magazines.

And now it's been extended to online journalism, literature, and musical composition. The Pulitzer Board has all these jurors. The jurors rate and review and eventually provide an award to journalists in the various categories. A journalist can then win the Pulitzer Prize, and it's a big distinction, but that's what it is. It's like a prize that's given to journalists. I mean, the Pulitzer board is just trying to support the public good of awarding good journalists with an award. Why Donald Trump is so obsessed on Pulitzer. He's always been obsessed with Pulitzer. Is also just one of the bizarre, strange, and things that just show this is a mentally unstable,

dangerous, erratic, despicable person. And you could just go back to his obsession. I'm not going to show you the, because I could probably show you literally. Some people say they like when I say literally all the time. I could probably show you literally some people say you know like when I say literally all the time I could probably show you hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of videos of Donald Trump talking about the Pulitzer but I'll just show you a handful right now so let me show you so this is in 2016 Donald Trump says that the National Enquirer deserves the Pulitzer. This is July of 2016. Donald Trump is then a candidate for president. He's saying the National Enquirer deserves the Pulitzer for their coverage that Ted Cruz's

father killed JFK. I'm not making this up. Play the clip. This was the National Enquirer cover at the end of the Republican primary. Ted Cruz's father linked to JFK assassination, right? And that's crazy in the middle of a presidential campaign to see a supermarket tabloid trying to help their favored candidate by putting out something loony tunes like this about his last remaining serious primary opponent. But this was not just a loony tunes thing on the periphery.

This was not an unwelcome intrusion into the campaign by this publication. The candidate himself was totally on board with this. There was a picture on the front page of the National Enquirer, which does have credibility. And on the cover of the National Enquirer, there was a picture of him and crazy Lee Harvey Oswald having breakfast. This was a magazine that frankly in many respects should be very respected. I mean if that was the New York Times they would have gotten Pulitzer Prizes for their reporting. I've

always said why didn't the National Enquirer get the Pulitzer Prize? That's my favorite photographic imagery of Mike Pence as he's absorbing what Donald Trump is saying about the National,

the Lee Harvey Pulitzer Prize. He said Pulitzer Prize again. Donald Trump perfectly in his element talking about the National Enquirer. Mike Pence swallowing his tongue, thinking, wow, this is going to be my new life. Mother.

And we could fast forward to January, I think it's January 2020, January 22nd, 2020, to be specific, in Davos at the World Economic Forum. Donald Trump is the president. This is before COVID spread to our shores. Donald Trump is representing the United States at Davos at an important meeting in the World Economic Forum. And this is what he talks about. He talks about

the Pulitzer. Play the clip. One thing, if we could straighten out the press in our country, we would have a place that would be so incredible. The press is so dishonest, so corrupt. I read it all the time. Stories, I don't mind bad stories. I deserve bad stories sometimes. But when I do something great or good, let it be written about good. Same thing with other people. The corruption in the media, as I call it, the fake news media, is unbelievable.

And hopefully, everybody's going to sort of learn a lesson. People got Pulitzer Prizes for their coverage of me. And it turned out they were totally wrong. Other people, Sean Hannity, Rushbow, a lot of great people, a lot of great writers. They got it right. They didn't get Pulitzer Prizes, but they got it right. The Russian hoax was a terrible thing. The dossier was a phony deal paid for by Hillary Clinton and

the DNC and used in the FISA courts totally illegally. No, it's a terrible thing that happened. This was a takedown attempt at a sitting president of the United States and we caught them. So let's see what happens. And throughout 2020, he keeps talking about the Pulitzer. This is April of 2020, talking about how upset he is that Maggie Haberman got a Pulitzer from the New York Times. Play the clip. Very honest, but some very dishonest. You know that. You know that. I even read a story where Mark Meadows, tough guy, he was crying. He was crying. There was a Maggie Haberman.

You know, she won a Pulitzer Prize for her coverage of Russia, but she was wrong in Russia. So was everyone else. They should all give back their Pulitzer Prizes. In fact, it turned out that the crime was committed by the other side. The crime was not committed by this side. It was committed by the other side. The crime was not committed by this side. It was committed by the other side, a bunch of bad people. You saw the reports coming out over the last two weeks. They got caught. So Maggie Haberman gets a Pulitzer Prize.

She's a third-rate reporter, New York Times. And we put her name up here last week. You saw that. People thought it was a commercial. It wasn't a commercial. It's like a commercial, but it wasn't a commercial. It was just clips. And because we exposed her as being a bad reporter,

what happened is she came out and said, Mark Meadows was crying. And they made it sound, I said, Mark, and it's okay if he did. I wouldn't, you know, look, but I think he was crying probably really for the wrong reason they had it down, but he's not a crier. And if he was, I have no cries. I could tell you people that you know that are very famous, they cry and that's okay too. But it was a nasty story in so many ways. It was fake news and she only did it because we exposed her. Here's another clip. This one's from September of 2020 at a press conference. He's,

again, talking about the Pulitzer. As soon as his father becomes vice president. No, I think that'll come up. I don't think I don't think Joe can answer it. Frankly, I think there's only one reason he made all that money. And then you have to say, what about Joe's involvement? And why did Joe not give the billion dollars over to Ukraine, as an example, until such time as they let go of a prosecutor that was investigating the company that his son was involved with? I mean, there are some bad questions.

I don't think they have answers. And if we had a media that was fair, even just reasonable, this would be the biggest story for years and years and years. Then you'd really be entitled to real Pulitzer Prizes, not the fake committee that gives you these fake awards. So, I mean, it's a really fair question. But it's hard to believe when you see the kind of money that he has made from China, from Russia, where the wife of the mayor of Moscow gives him three and a half million dollars and nobody even has any question about it.

Why did he get three and a half million dollars? I'll tell you why. Because Joe Biden was in on it. Joe was in on it. There's no way that he wasn't. And uses Joe Biden's plane, Air Force Two, uses Joe, and they go to China and then he comes back and he never mentioned it to his father that he just got a billion and a half dollars. And now it's turning out that it's much more money than that, Rudy. It's turned out to be much more money from

China. They have a member of the Chinese Communist Party gave him a lot of money. And the press has no interest in these stories. It's just very disheartening for the people of our country. Please. The Press Press Press Press Press If he tries to dodge the questions or doesn't address them head on, are you prepared with the facts

and information to answer that for the American people? The President Well, I have all the information. It just came out. I mean, I didn't know about Moscow, $3.5 million from the mayor's wife. I didn't know about that. And he's a very influential, powerful man in Russia, as you know.

And it wasn't me. I didn't have anything to do with Russia. That came out loud and clear. What also came out is they should have never gone into this fake Mueller investigation. And it also came out that the 31 phones that were wiped clean shouldn't have been wiped clean and that's a criminal act. And Bloomberg likewise shouldn't be paying for prisoners to go in Florida and go and vote because he's basically paying, which is totally illegal, going and paying prisoners. I hope he hasn't done it yet, but he's down in writing, is doing it.

This is what he wants to do so that he can ingratiate himself to the Democrats. And now here's the video of Donald Trump from October 22nd of 2022. So this was a few months back at this point where he said in the next two weeks that he would be filing a lawsuit against Pulitzer. Play the clip. This was on one of his deranged campaign rallies for the loser candidates that he endorsed during this midterm election cycle that Americans, by and large, completely rejected. Play this clip of Trump in 2022, talking about the Pulitzer. You notice nobody talks about it. And yet they gave out the Pulitzer Prize for reporting on the Russia hoax, okay? Reporting on Russia, Russia, Russia. So you have reporters from the Washington

Post, the New York Times that got Pulitzer Prizes, and they reported the exact wrong thing. So, within the next two weeks, we're suing the Pulitzer organization to have those prizes taken back. We'll be doing that over the next two weeks. I think it's a very good lawsuit, but we'll see. But we're suing them. Think of it. They got the Pulitzer Prize for wrong reporting. But other people should have gotten the Pulitzer Prize because, frankly, they got it right for years.

And they don't do Pulitzer Prizes for guys like Sean Hannity, but they should, by a different name, and Tucker Carlson, and Jeanine Pirro, and Laura, and so many different people, but they don't get anything. They give Pulitzer Prizes to the people that got it wrong. Remember this, by allowing these people that got Russia, Russia, Russia wrong, they're actually libeling me because they're saying they got it right, and it turned out to be a hoax, And everybody now has admitted it was a hoax. Even the Times and even the Washington Post, they said it's a hoax. So if it's a hoax, then let them give the Pulitzer Prizes back or take them back. They shouldn't be allowed to keep them.

Now, when Donald Trump said that he was suing the Pulitzer in that October speech. I remember that speech. I did a video on it and a number of the other just despicable and dangerous and deranged things that he said. But as I explained in that video, I said, there is no claim, there is no cause of action, there is no defamatory act. How is he suing the Pulitzer Board? What's the Pulitzer Board's role in this? There isn't an underlying defamatory act. The Pulitzer Organization wasn't involved in engaging in any defamatory acts at all. Setting that aside, if you go back to the fact that he's alleging that this occurred in 2018, what are we talking about? The statute of limitations in Florida for a defamation action is two years.

If it's in New York, it's one year. He filed this lawsuit, I should have mentioned at the outset, in Okeechobee County, Florida. I have no clue what the basis of filing this in Okeechobee County, Florida. I have no clue what the basis of filing this in Okeechobee County, Florida. I think he picked a random county to even file this in. It's not in the right court. It's not in the right state. It's not actually asserting any legitimate claims.

There's nothing defamatory that took place. It is a bizarre conspiracy-laden complaint. And I had previously said that lawsuit that Alina Haba filed in Florida back in March of 2022, I thought that's as deranged as you get. The Rico racketeering one where she's already been sanctioned for 60K or so. She's probably going to be sanctioned several hundred thousand dollars more. The federal judge in that case said that she should or she could be reported to the state bar for just the conduct at issue, which the judge essentially said was unethical for even bringing this type of case. This is actually a more outlandish case

than that racketeering case to sue the Pulitzer Prize board. Are you kidding me? And I think I even have to mention this, but I will. I mean, when we talk about the Mueller investigation, while Mueller felt constrained to prosecute a sitting president based on what he believed were the norms that existed within the Department of Justice at the time, which is completely absurd, but it's a whole other story. How about the convictions of Paul Manafort, who Donald Trump pardoned, but Paul Manafort was convicted arising out of the Mueller investigation

in Virginia, in Washington, D.C., on like 18 counts in Virginia and like seven counts in Washington, D.C. for all of his foreign contacts. How about Rick Gates, another Trump campaign official who pled guilty? How about Mike Flynn? Obstruction. Rick Gates also obstruction, pled guilty. Mike Flynn was pardoned by Trump. Countless other indictments and convictions as well by Mueller. I won't belabor the point here, but there was serious entanglements with Russia, period.

There absolutely was. Donald Trump's team engaged in obstruction of the Mueller investigation. Mueller thought that there should be a prosecution, except that Trump was a sitting president. Bill Barr, when he got the Mueller report, immediately made the decision not to prosecute and wrote a letter that completely misrepresented what the Mueller report stated. That said, for them to file a lawsuit on this basis, then to have Fox and the New York Post perpetuate this lawsuit as though it is legitimate, as though it's on equal footing with real important litigation and lawsuit that exists, is really part of a broader disinformation campaign that the right wing is thrusting, is forcing on America generally, and it is just so dangerous.

That's why I wanted to break down on this video at each and every step how this disinformation works, how our court system is being used and abused by the right wing in tandem with the media, because ultimately what they then try to sell to their followers is, well, this was a lawsuit. There's a lawsuit that's been filed. A lawsuit wouldn't just be filed for other reasons. And okay, well then if Democrats file a lawsuit, here's a lawsuit. There are just two lawsuits. And then when he loses the case, it barely gets reported on. And then he'll just say, oh, you know, the judge is a rhino. Or it's a Democrat judge or a rhino judge.

That's what he says, unless it's Judge Eileen Cannon, who you then have to wait three months, four months for it to get in front of a court of appeals, which eventually will do the right thing and overturn her. This lawsuit isn't going anywhere. He's going to be sanctioned. But in addition to, look, I mean, we've talked about this here together on the Midas Touch Network. I feel strongly lots of other legal analysts were very well experienced, feel strongly. Jack Smith is going to indict Donald Trump in the next two or three months. People feel very comfortable with that. My own prediction is it's more the three to four months. Some other people who have more experience than me in federal cases, a lot more, like Preet Bharara, former U.S. attorney,

thinks it's going to happen within a month or certainly less than two months, he predicts. We'll see. I still think it's more April or May. But at this point, Pulitzer should file a vexatious litigation motion against Trump. There needs to be action here so that Trump can't file these lawsuits anymore. And it's such a rare situation. It's kind of the situation that I mentioned at the outset where an individual says that aliens from outer space caused an injury where a vexatious litigation comes into play. There are some of those cases where people abuse important laws that are intended to help people with disabilities, but there'll be these plaintiffs who serve as kind of proxies for a law firm and they'll bring like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of lawsuits against small businesses to try to get them to settle if the toilet paper is not on the right height or if the handle's not specifically within one centimeter or two centimeters of where

it's supposed to be. And even where a business is compliant, you'll have a situation where they'll still sue because it'll cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend against. I'm just saying that's another area sometimes where we see vexatious litigation motions. Other situations where we see vexatious litigation type of motions to literally stop somebody from utilizing the court system. Sometimes prisoners will file so much stuff and handwritten stuff and keep submitting it to courts that there's a process that's dealt with there. But we're talking about really rare circumstances because this is so deranged.

I mean, there's no other way to describe this behavior other than it is beneath contempt. It is beneath and beyond anything that's ever existed of an abusive process. There is no comparable to this behavior. And filing this against the Pulitzer is just one of the strangest things ever. So for all of the reasons I said, this case is going nowhere. But what a deranged case to bring that this is actually real. And Fox, New York Post, owned by Murdoch. They then traffic that lawsuit, push it out to their people as a headline. Trump then uses their story, fundraises off the story, earns back the money that he will be sanctioned, plus additional money, perpetuates a right-wing disinformation chamber. All the other right-wing media outlets start picking it up. They then cover it. Newsmax will cover it. OAN will cover it.

Bannon's thing will cover it. They report it like the New York Post said. And then on Fox Digital, they said, they act like it's a real thing. They don't talk about the loss. It is a vicious, vicious cycle. And the media, that's not the right-wing fascist media, but at this point, lots of the large networks are right-wing fascists leading anyway. But just say the large networks in general, if you want to give the most favorable interpretation, they're, what, too lazy to cover it? So they just pick up the headline.

They run with it. Trump files lawsuit against Pulitzer. They don't call it out the way it needs to be. And they've let this country down. That's why we do what we do here on the Midas Touch Network we got to reinvent we got to rethink how to do media it's got to be independent it's got to be detailed it's got to come from the heart it's got to educate we got to speak directly to the people. It's not in sound bites. It's the way we're doing this together. So thank you all for watching this.

Hit the subscribe button, please. It is important that we grow this independent platform together. It's free to subscribe. So hit that subscribe button right there on YouTube. And in addition, you might as well check us out at patreon.com slash Midas Touch, P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com slash Midas Touch. We're not funded by any outside investors. We're 100% independent, 100% accountable to you and you alone. So if you can, you'll love the exclusive content that we have on patreon.com slash Midas Touch. But most importantly, let's grow this platform together. I'm Ben Micellis from the Midas Touch Network.