Trump Threatens to Sue Pulitzer Committee After They Officially Rebutted His Complaints About Russia Reporting
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Former President Donald Trump threatened a defamation lawsuit this week as he continues to complain about the Pulitzer Prize committee awarding the 2018 prize for national reporting to the New York Times and The Washington Post for their coverage “on Russian interference in the U.S. election and its connections to the Trump campaign.”
Trump’s previous statements blasting the award and decrying the reporting honored by the Pulitzer as the “Russia hoax” led to an internal investigation by the committee, which released its findings in July.
The Pulitzer committee’s review, which involved two separate independent investigations, roundly rejected Trump’s claims that the reporting was inaccurate. “Both reviews were conducted by individuals with no connection to the institutions whose work was under examination, nor any connection to each other,” the board explained in a statement, adding:
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
On Thursday, Trump’s legal team sent a letter to Marjorie Miller, administrator of the Pulitzer Prize board, demanding the statement from the board verifying the reporting in the Post and Times on Russia interference be immediately retracted.
“Be advised that the Board, including its individual members, may be subject to suit and exposed to a judgment for damages, including punitive damages, for defamation,” reads the letter, under a copy of the Pulitzer statement from July.
“This letter places the Board on notice that the Defamatory Statement must be removed from the Board’s website within five (5) days of receipt of this letter, and a full and fair correction, apology, or retraction issued. Under the circumstances, rescinding the 2018 Pulitzer Prizes in National Reporting from their current recipients would necessarily be part of any full and fair attempt to right the wrong caused by the Board’s conduct,” the letter added.
Trump’s legal team sent a similar letter to CNN before officially filing a lawsuit seeking $475 million in punitive damages from the network over alleged defamation in early October.
Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election has been widely documented by U.S. intelligence agencies as well as by the U.S. Senate, which released a bipartisan report documenting what it called a “grave” threat.
Roll Call reported on the release of the report in August 2020, noting a Republican-run Senate and Senate Intelligence Committee, documented the Russian interference:
“We found irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling,” Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., acting chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement, directly refuting President Donald Trump’s repeated assertions that Russian interference was a “hoax” perpetrated by Democrats.
