Former President Donald Trump has filed a defamation lawsuit against the Pulitzer Prize Board for continuing to defend debunked Russiagate honors awarded to writers at The New York Times and The Washington Post.
From Fox News:
Trump’s suit, filed Tuesday in Okeechobee County, Florida, was obtained by Fox News Digital. It states that a “demonstrably false connection was and remains the stated basis” for the coverage that received the prestigious award.
The staff of the Times and Post shared the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for National reporting for “deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest 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,” according to the Pulitzer website.
“A large swath of Americans had a tremendous misunderstanding of the truth at the time the Times’ and the Post’s propagation of the Russia Collusion Hoax dominated the media,” the complaint states. “Remarkably, they were rewarded for lying to the American public.”
…
“While elements at both the Times and the Post were almost certainly complicit in the Russia Collusion Hoax, is ultimately immaterial whether the authors of the Awarded Articles understood at the time they were propagating political disinformation manufactured by paid sources in an attempt mislead the public and tarnish President Trump’s reputation and political prospects,” the complaint stated.
“What matters instead is the Defendants’ conduct, particularly when many of the key assertions and premises of the Russia Collusion Hoax that permeated the Awarded Articles had been revealed by the Mueller Report and congressional investigations as false after the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting had been awarded,” the complaint continued.
Earlier this year, the Pulitzer Prize board defended its decision to stand behind the awards.
“The Pulitzer Prize Board has an established, formal process by which complaints against winning entries are carefully reviewed. In the last three years, the Pulitzer Board has received inquiries, including from former President Donald Trump, about submissions from The New York Times and The Washington Post on Russian interference in the U.S. election and its connections to the Trump campaign–submissions that jointly won the 2018 National Reporting prize,” the Pulitzer Prize Board wrote earlier this year.
“These inquiries prompted the Pulitzer Board to commission two independent reviews of the work submitted by those organizations to our National Reporting competition. Both reviews were conducted by individuals with no connection to the institutions whose work was under examination, nor any connection to each other. The separate reviews converged in their conclusions: 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 board continued.
More over at Fox News:
Trump files defamation suit against members of Pulitzer Prize Board for defending 'debunked' Russiagate honors https://t.co/LMmRxaDEY7
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