Former President Donald Trump has sent a letter to the Pulitzer Prize board asking that they rescind the Washington Post and New York Times’ awards for their “Russia collusion” coverage.
Trump declared in the lengthy letter that the awards were based on “false reporting” and a “complete lack of evidence.”
NEW!
President Donald J. Trump’s Letter to the Pulitzer Prizes pic.twitter.com/tJlOwf6GdU
— Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) October 3, 2021
The letter began:
“I call on the Pulitzer Prize Board to immediately rescind the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting awarded to the staffs of The New York Times and The Washington Post, which was based on false reporting of a non-existent link between the Kremlin and the Trump Campaign. 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.”
Trump proceeded to say that when the Board announced the prize, it lauded the recipients “for deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nations’ 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.”
Specifically, Trump noted, they were awarded for “a series of articles centered around the now-debunked Russia collusion conspiracy theory.”
The letter pointed out that Michael Sussmann, a lawyer who worked for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, was indicted in special counsel John Durham’s investigation. He allegedly lied to the FBI in 2016 when he reported a “possible link” between the Trump campaign and a bank that has ties to the Russian government.
Trump continued:
“At the time, Mr. Sussman assured the FBI that he was providing this information of his own accord, and not at the behest of any particular individual or entity. The indictment reveals, however, that Mr. Sussman was working with other Democrats and billing his time to the Clinton campaign. Importantly, the indictment reinforces the falsehood of the Alfa Bank connection, stating that ‘the FBI’s investigation revealed that the e-mail server at issue was not owned or operated by the Trump Organization but, rather, had been administered by a mass marketing email company that send advertisements for Trump hotels and hundreds of other clients.'”
The former president went on to argue that the prize has been “widely recognized as a significant achievement in the field of journalism” for over a century and that “when it becomes apparent that a Pulitzer Prize-winning work was based on shoddy, dubious and manifestly false reporting – as is the case here – the Pulitzer Prize Board must react accordingly.”
Trump concluded by saying he hopes the newspapers will voluntarily surrender the awards, but if not, the board should rescind them. He asserted that “without holding the recipients to such a high standard of accountability, the integrity of the Pulitzer Prize namesake stands to be wholly compromised.”
