Donald Trump is suing the Pulitzer Prize Board over the panel’s award for “Russian collusion” stories pushed by the New York Times and Washington Post.
The lawsuit was filed in Okeechobee County, Florida, and states that the awards were based on a “demonstrably false connection” that “was and remains the stated basis” for their stories.
The complaint goes on to claim that “a large swath of Americans had a tremendous misunderstanding of the truth” because the Times and the Post pushed “the Russia Collusion Hoax.”
And, as the narrative “dominated the media,” those newspapers were, according to the lawsuit, “rewarded for lying to the American public.”
The filing goes on to cite Special Counsel Robert Mueller for having failed to find evidence of collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia and other “congressional investigations” that determined reporting on the matter was “false.”
Trump says he is suing the Pulitzer organization to revoke prizes awarded to NYT and WaPo reporters: “Within the next 2 weeks, we’re suing to have those prizes taken back.”
He has been saying this for over a year. pic.twitter.com/0v2WfPgCqg
— Ron Filipkowski ?? (@RonFilipkowski) October 23, 2022
RELATED: McEnany Blasts New York Times Over Russian Bounty Report: ‘Give Back Your Pulitzer’
Trump Suing Pulitzer Prize Board Over Russia Collusion Stories
The New York Times and the Washington Post were jointly awarded the Pulitzer for their 2017 coverage of former President Trump and his alleged ties to Russian operatives during the 2016 presidential campaign.
The staff of the newspapers in question were awarded $15,000 “for a distinguished example of reporting on national affairs, using any available journalistic tool.”
Any available journalistic tool? Like the Steele dossier, which has been thoroughly discredited?
The Pulitzer Board celebrated the Times and the Post for their “deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage … of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign … his eventual administration.”
A vast swath of that ‘relentless reporting’ had to be corrected since its ‘deep sources’ ended up being little more than garbage.
Washington Post Corrected At Least 14 Articles
The Trump lawsuit against the Pulitzer Prize Board notes specifically how the Washington Post has “retracted statements from several articles from 2017 relating to the Steele Dossier and other alleged connections between the Trump campaign and Russia.”
The Political Insider reported on this in November of last year, revealing that the Post quietly edited at least 14 articles that relied on the discredited Steele dossier.
The articles edited range from 2017 to 2019 – nearly three years’ worth of reporting that remained published on the Washington Post website for many, many months with false information.
OUR BAD: Washington Post Corrects ‘Dozens of Articles’ Related to Debunked Steele Dossier https://t.co/a0obLnicuJ
— Sean Hannity (@seanhannity) November 18, 2021
Axios at the time called for a media reckoning over the false reporting on the Steele dossier.
“It’s one of the most egregious journalistic errors in modern history,” they wrote, but “the media’s response to its own mistakes has so far been tepid.”
Trump’s White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany famously dressed down the Washington Post and the New York Times for a report in 2020 accusing then-President Trump of having been briefed about Russia paying bounties to the Taliban to target and kill American troops.
Lo and behold, it turned out that story could also be classified as fake news. President Biden’s own administration admitted that U.S. intelligence did not have conclusive evidence that the reports on the Russian bounties were ever true.
NEW: U.S. intel walks back blockbuster ‘Russian bounties’ claim https://t.co/jtPzfALH1L
— Noah Shachtman (@NoahShachtman) April 15, 2021
“I really think that it’s time for the New York Times to step back and ask themselves why they’ve been wrong, so wrong, so often,” McEnany blasted reporters at the time.
“It is inexcusable, the failed Russian reporting of the New York Times, and I think it’s time that the New York Times and also the Washington Post hand back their Pulitzers,” she said walking off.
The Pulitzer Prize Board issued a statement earlier this year insisting that none of the articles used as the basis for the awards “were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes.”
Trump’s complaint is seeking damages “in an amount to be proven at trial.”
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