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President Donald Trump slammed the Pulitzer Prize Board Monday for its decision not to rescind the 2018 National Reporting prizes the organization awarded for reporting on the since-debunked “Russian collusion” allegations against the president.
“The Pulitzer Board has taken away any shred of credibility it had left with its ‘response’ regarding the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, which was awarded to The New York Times and The Washington Post for blatant fake news,” Trump said in a statement released through his Save America PAC.
“Instead of acting with integrity and providing transparency, the Pulitzer Board is running cover for the biggest reporting failure in modern history: the fake Russia Russia Russia collusion hoax,” the 45th president continued.
Since October, the president has submitted multiple requests asking the Pulitzer Prize Board to retract the prizes which the board says were awarded 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.”
In a May letter to the board, Trump noted much of that coverage was “based on false and fabricated information,” warning, “The continuing publication and recognition of the prizes on the Board’s website is a distortion of fact and a personal defamation that will result in the filing of litigation if the Board cannot be persuaded to do the right thing on its own.”
In a statement released Monday, the Pulitzer Board responded by noting that two independent reviews of the reporting in question had found 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 2018 Pulitzer Prizes in National Reporting stand,” the board added.
For President Trump, however, the board’s explanation fell flat.
“If the Pulitzer Prize has become a blatant acknowledgment of false, liberal political propaganda, then the Pulitzer Board should just say so,” he said. “Instead, they hide their supposed ‘independent investigations’ in a veil of secrecy, so the public cannot know the truth.”
Adding that the New York Times and The Washington Post should do “the honorable thing” and return their prizes anyway, the president concluded with a vow to pursue justice not only on this matter but also on the Jan. 6 Committee’s witch hunt.
“I will continue doing everything possible to right the wrong caused by the 2018 Pulitzer Prize and also to right the wrong being done by the January 6 Committee of Unselects, where there is no Due Process, no Cross-Examination, no real Republican members, and no legitimacy,” he said. “It is a witch-hunt of the highest level, the likes of which has never been seen in our Country before.”