Pulitzer Prize board rejects Trump call to revoke Russia meddling
From left, Washington Post Publisher Fred Ryan, Executive Editor Marty Baron, and National Security Editor Peter Finn, applaud as investigative reporter Tom Hamburger speaks to the newsroom after The Washington Post wins two pulitzer prizes, Monday, April 16, 2018, in Washington.
Andrew Harnik | AP
The Pulitzer Prize Board on Monday rejected former President Donald Trump’s yearslong campaign for the organization to strip The New York Times and The Washington Post of the awards they received for their reporting on Russian election interference.
The board made that decision after two separate, independent reviews found that the award-winning reporting on Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential contest between Trump and Hillary Clinton stood up to scrutiny.
“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 Pulitzer board said in a press release.
“The 2018 Pulitzer Prizes in National Reporting stand,” it added.
A spokeswoman for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the board’s statement. Neither the Times nor the Post immediately responded to CNBC’s requests for comment.
The conclusion comes nearly nine months after Trump sent a letter demanding that the group rescind those prizes. He claimed that the newspapers published their investigations based on “false reporting.”
Trump has issued similar calls since 2019, following the release of the final report from then-special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Kremlin election meddling and possible coordination with Trump’s 2016 campaign.
Mueller’s report, which was summarized in a controversial preview by then-Attorney General William Barr in March 2019, did not find sufficient evidence to establish a conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign. But Mueller stressed that Trump was not exonerated by the 448-page report, which laid out numerous instances of possible obstruction of justice by the former president.
Trump, who had often referred to the special counsel probe as a “witch hunt,” nevertheless claimed “Complete and Total Exoneration.” Shortly after the release of Barr’s summary of the Mueller report, Trump tweeted that the Times and the Post should have their Pulitzers “taken away by the Committee!”
But the newsrooms stood by the reporting that netted them both the 2018 Pulitzer Prizes for “deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage” 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.”
That coverage, published throughout 2017, shed light on Russian links to people in the then-president’s orbit, including former national security advisor Michael Flynn and Trump’s adult son, Donald Trump Jr. It also highlighted the circumstances that spurred Mueller’s appointment as…
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