(Headline USA) The Pulitzer Prize Board rejected a request this week from former President Donald Trump to rescind the 2018 prizes given to the New York Times and Washington Post for their coverage of the Russia-collusion hoax.
The board said that it ran two independent reviews of the stories in question and found that they did not include any inaccuracies or lies.
“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 board claimed. “Both reviews were conducted by individuals with no connection to the institutions whose work was under examination, nor any connection to each other.”
The board also noted that it received inquiries questioning the prizes from multiple parties—not just Trump.
Trump has slammed the media outlets’ reporting on the Hillary Clinton-devised smear attack in coordination with the FBI and the Obama administration as a “now-debunked Russia collusion conspiracy theory.”
He first called for the Pulitzer board to revoke the outlet’s awards in 2018, arguing that the reports were “based on shoddy, dubious, and manifestly false reporting.”
“As has been widely publicized, the coverage was no more than a politically motivated farce which attempted to spin a false narrative that my campaign supposedly colluded with Russia despite a complete lack of evidence underpinning this allegation,” he said in a letter to the board.
Multiple federal investigations, including a highly publicized one by former special counsel Robert Mueller, have found no evidence in support of the hoax.
In fact, an ongoing investigation by special counsel John Durham found that much of the “evidence” used by the FBI to justify the hoax had been planted by Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Trump previously threatened to file litigation against the Pulitzer board if it did not “do the right thing on its own,” but has not declared his intent to follow through on that promise.
