Trump demands NY Times, Washington Post return Pulitzers for Russia hoax
Former President Donald Trump called on the New York Times and Washington Post late Monday to give back the Pulitzer Prizes they won for their reporting on the FBI’s investigation into alleged ties between his 2016 campaign and Russia.
“Why would The Washington Post or The New York Times ever want to admit their obvious mistakes and come clean when their false reporting is being guarded, and awarded, by the Pulitzer Prize, which at one point actually meant something?” the 45th president said in a statement on his social media site, Truth Social.
“These outlets should hand back their prizes without notification from Pulitzer, which would be the honorable thing to do,” he added.
Trump was responding to the Pulitzer Prize board rejecting his request to rescind the 2018 award for national reporting, which the Times and Washington Post shared for — as the board put it at the time — “deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.”
On Monday, the board announced that independent reviews of the honored reporting found “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.”
Trump formally called on the board to revoke the awards in October 2021, accusing both outlets of “false reporting of a non-existent link between the Kremlin and the Trump Campaign.”
In his response, Trump said the board “has taken away any shred of credibility it had left.”
“Instead of acting with integrity and providing transparency, the Pulitzer Board is running cover for the biggest reporting failure in modern history: the fake Russia Russia Russia collusion hoax,” he added.
The former president said the only Pulitzer the New York Times and Washington Post should get is in the category of “disinformation for helping to perpetuate a false story created and peddled by Crooked Hillary Clinton, the DNC, and certain lowlife Democrats.”
He further claimed the reporting singled out by the board “was fabricated by foreign operatives and my political opponents.”
“If the Pulitzer Prize has become a blatant acknowledgement of false, liberal political propaganda, then the Pulitzer Board should just say so,” Trump went on.
Trump first asked for the awards to be revoked in 2019 after special counsel Robert Mueller’s report found there was no evidence of the Trump campaign colluding with the Kremlin during the 2016 presidential campaign.
In his statement castigating the Pulitzer board, Trump also took aim at the House select committee investigating the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021, describing it as another “witch hunt.”
“I will continue doing everything possible to right the wrong caused by the 2018 Pulitzer Prize and also to right the wrong being done by the January 6 Committee of Unselects, where there is no Due Process, no Cross-Examination, no real Republican members, and no legitimacy,” he said.
“It is a witch-hunt of the highest level, the likes of which has never been seen in our Country before,” Trump said.
The committee, which has two Republican members — Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois — will hold its eighth hearing in primetime Thursday.
The panel is expected to explore Trump’s behavior during the more than three hours between the moment a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol and when he urged them to leave the building.
