Former President Trump is threatening to sue the Pulitzer Prize Board for awards given the Washington Post and the New York Times for debunked stories they published saying Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election said Just The News.
Pulitzer board stonewalls queries about Trump lawsuit, rescinding prizes for debunked Russia collusion reporting | Just The News https://t.co/xV0cqCAM4c
— John Solomon (@jsolomonReports) November 19, 2021
In a letter to the Pulitzer Board, a Trump attorney, Alina Habba, wrote: “It is hereby demanded that the Pulitzer Prize Board take immediate steps to strip the New York Times and The Washington Post of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. Pulitzer Prize Board’s failure to do so will result in prompt legal action being taken against it.”
Trump said one recipient of the awards at issue, the Washington Post, “has acknowledged the unsubstantiated nature of its reporting as it relates to these events,” according to the Daily Mail. “Specifically, on November 12, 2021, The Post retracted statements from several articles relating to the Steele Dossier and the alleged Russia-Trump connection.”
In fact, as of Thursday, the Post had corrected more than a dozen of its stories related to the Russia hoax.
However, it told Just the News that any corrections issued by the paper covered different stories about Russia–Trump collusion, not the stories for which the paper was awarded prizes by Pulitzer.
The demand by Trump follows the indictment of Igor Danchenko for five counts of lying to the FBI. Danchenko, 43, was a prime source on stories about Russia and Trump in the so-called Steele Dossier which makes up much of the collusion narrative.
“The flaws in the Steele dossier and Mr. Danchenko’s 2017 interviews with FBI agents played a central role in a high-profile 2019 report by the Justice Department’s inspector general,” said the New York Times.
That report faulted the FBI for using the Steele Dossier for continued investigation of Trump and his associates without notifying the supervising judge of doubts about the credibility of the Steele Dossier.
“The inspector general report also said that a decade earlier, when Mr. Danchenko — who was born in Russia but lives in the United States—worked for the Brookings Institution, a prominent Washington think-tank, he had been the subject of a counterintelligence investigation into whether he was a Russian agent,” said the New York Times.
