Donald Trump has taken a dig at the winners of this year’s Pulitzer Prize, recalling the reporters’ role in spreading a debunked conspiracy theory that he colluded with the Kremlin to steal the 2016 presidential election from Hillary Clinton.
“Why should the Fake News Media and their ‘journalists’ receive a Pulitzer Prize for their totally incorrect reporting on Russia, Russia, Russia? It was a complete HOAX. The Pulitzer Committee is in turmoil”, Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social platform on Monday.
The former president did not elaborate on which journalists he was talking about.
A gaggle of Washington Post journalists won the 2022 Pulitzer for their multipart coverage of the 6 January 2021 takeover of the Capitol by angry Trump supporters convinced the election had been stolen from him, entitled "The Attack".
Trump threatened to take the Pulitzer Committee to court late last year if The Washington Post and The New York Times weren’t stripped of their prize for national reporting, which they won in 2018 for their "Trump-Russia collusion" coverage.
In a letter accompanying attorney correspondence, Trump urged the Pulitzer board “to immediately rescind” the 2018 awards to the WaPo and NYT, saying the reporting was just “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 insisted that he had been exonerated of the charges against him, first with the 2019 Mueller report – which found no evidence of collusion between his campaign and the Kremlin, and then with the September 2021 indictment of Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussman for false statements to the FBI about alleged secret communications between the Trump Organization and a Russian bank.
Trump spent the better part of his four years in office fighting off Russiagate-related allegations, which Democrats continued to use as talking points even after the release of the Mueller report. Last week, Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson linked the Democratic Party's Russiagate claims directly to the current Russia-NATO crisis over Ukraine.