By Noreen Marcus, FloridaBulldog
A state appeals court judge who’s poised to secure a lifetime position on South Florida’s federal court stands accused of hanging onto a case he should have dropped so he could rule in favor of President Donald Trump.
Last month Trump nominated Chief Judge Jeffrey Kuntz of the Fourth District Court of Appeal (4th DCA) in West Palm Beach for the federal court that covers nine counties from Key West to Vero Beach. Trump called Kuntz “tough and smart” and praised his “steadfast commitment to upholding the rule of law” in a Truth Social post.
Nevertheless, Kuntz had to field awkward questions at his April 29 Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing. Sen. Chris Coons, D-DE, revealed that Kuntz ruled for Trump, the plaintiff in a libel case, at the same time Kuntz was pursuing a federal judgeship in February 2025.
When Coons asked why he didn’t disqualify himself, Kuntz said he obeyed Florida Supreme Court ethics rules.
In fact, though, Canon 3 E(1) of the Florida Code of Judicial Conduct states unequivocally that a judge “shall disqualify himself or herself in a proceeding in which the judge’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” The Alliance for Justice referred to Kuntz’s apparent violation of that rule when it rated him “unfit and unqualified” for a federal judgeship.
Judge Ed Artau, another member of the 4th DCA panel that advanced the libel suit, argued more forcefully for Trump than Kuntz did and was promoted to federal court first. The left-leaning Alliance for Justice, a nonprofit coalition of progressive groups that vets judicial candidates – much like the right-leaning Federalist Society – also opposed Artau’s confirmation.
Still, the Senate voted 50 to 43 on Sept. 8 to confirm Artau for the Southern District of Florida, where Kuntz will probably join him.
Kuntz’s confirmation vote isn’t scheduled yet but the outcome is predictable, according to Christine Zinner, an Alliance director in Washington, D.C. “Unfortunately, we saw how this movie ended with Judge Artau,” she said.
Her group maintains that judges who show blatant pro-Trump bias can’t be trusted to rule fairly. “Is it right for a litigant to have to wonder: Will Kuntz be committed to upholding the rule of law and the Constitution, or will his loyalties lie with Trump?” Zinner said.
“As we’re seeing so many of the lower courts holding the line on Trump’s unauthorized power grabs, it’s more important than ever for our judiciary to remain independent,” she said.
THE PULITZER BOARD LIBEL CASE
Kuntz was a 10-year commercial litigator and appellate specialist with the GrayRobinson law firm when Gov. Rick Scott chose him for the 4th DCA in 2016. Now in his mid-40s, Kuntz’s colleagues elected him chief judge last June.
The case Sen. Coons questioned Kuntz about is a pending libel and conspiracy lawsuit that Trump filed against the Pulitzer Prize Board in December 2022.
He’d protested when the board gave Pulitzer Prizes to The New York Times and The Washington Post for their coverage of the “Russiagate” scandal and investigations into whether Trump’s campaign conspired with Russian operatives to help him win the presidency in 2016.
Trump demanded that the board cancel the prizes. When it refused he sued, claiming this statement the board released in July 2022 is false and damages his reputation:
“The Pulitzer Prize Board has an established, formal process by which complaints against winning entries are carefully reviewed. In the last three years, the Pulitzer Board has received inquiries, including from former President Donald Trump, about submissions from The New York Times and The Washington Post on Russian interference in the U.S. election and its connections to the Trump campaign — submissions that jointly won the 2018 National Reporting prize.
“These inquiries prompted the Pulitzer Board to commission two independent reviews of the work submitted by those organizations to our National Reporting competition. Both reviews were conducted by individuals with no connection to the institutions whose work was under examination, nor any connection to each other.
“The separate 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.
“The 2018 Pulitzer Prizes in National Reporting stand.”
STRONG START, WEAK FINISH?
Trump seldom wins the civil lawsuits he files “to bully the media,” according to First Amendment expert Timothy Zick, a professor at William & Mary Law School in Williamsburg, Va. This is especially true of libel suits – “In fact, he nearly always loses, sometimes very badly,” Zick wrote in response to questions from Florida Bulldog.
But the Pulitzer libel suit, which Trump’s lawyers filed in Okeechobee Circuit Court not far from his Palm Beach estate, got off to a promising start.
At first, 18 of the 19 Pulitzer defendants – only one lives in Florida – argued the lawsuit should be dismissed because Florida courts can’t assert authority over parties with negligible ties to the state.
The defendants are media and media-adjacent stars including New Yorker editor David Remnick, New York Times columnist Gail Collins and historian Anne Applebaum. Defendant Elizabeth Alexander is a poet and scholar who is president of the Mellon Foundation, a major private funder of the arts and supporter of cultural diversity.
After the defendants lost their initial argument in the trial court, they went to the 4th DCA, where their appeal landed with Judges Kuntz, Artau and Burton Conner.
Kuntz’s panel opinion unanimously affirmed Okeechobee Circuit Judge Robert Pegg, who’d found sufficient ties between the defendants and Florida. The board’s allegedly libelous statement reached a Florida resident named Trump, he noted. Also, the defendants held a meeting “attended remotely by [another] Florida resident who also conducted an editing review of the proposed website statement while in Florida,” the 4th DCA opinion says.
In his opinion Kuntz declined to comment about the quality of the case, which was irrelevant at that point. Yet Artau issued a separate opinion expressing his obvious belief that Trump should prevail against the Pulitzer Prize Board.
“As the President asserts,” Artau wrote, “‘the Russian Collusion Hoax was dead, at least until Defendants attempted to resurrect it’ by conspiring to publish a defamatory statement falsely implying that the President colluded with the Russians.”
Four months later Trump sent Artau’s name to the Senate, directing the Republican majority to make him a federal judge. The senators promptly obliged.
Meanwhile the Pulitzer case returned to Judge Pegg and entered a “discovery” phase that allows lawyers on both sides to go fishing for evidence. This year’s docket entries suggest that scant written evidence has emerged.
On Jan. 30 the defendants sent Trump’s lawyers a second request for production that asks for all documents in his possession having to do with the Mueller Report and its conclusions about Russian interference in the 2016 election – documents that Trump seems no more likely to release than his tax returns.
Then on March 5, Trump’s lawyers sent New Yorker editor Remnick the same kind of request, but phrased so broadly that a response is inconceivable. A sample: “produce any and all Documents and Communications … with, to, from, involving, and/or concerning any or all of the following Persons (including, but not limited to, any representative or agent of such Person):” followed by a list of 22 people drawn from Trump’s enemies list – Barack Obama, Alex Soros and John Brennan among them – plus the law firm Perkins Coie, the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Both requests set 30-day deadlines, apparently unmet.
The judge has shown impatience with Trump’s lawyers. On April 17 Pegg issued an unusual order: They’d have to file a case management plan within 20 days or the case would end automatically.
The order got results. Trump’s St. Petersburg lawyer R. Quincy Bird notified Pegg on Thursday that he’d filed the plan.
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