Trump reiterates calls for Pulitzers to withdraw awards to NYT, Washington Post

Former President Trump wrote to the administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes on Friday asking again that the board rescind its 2018 prizes for national reporting awarded to The New York Times and The Washington Post. 

“There is no dispute that the Pulitzer Board’s award to those media outlets was based on false and fabricated information that they published,” the former president wrote to administrator Marjorie Miller in a letter dated Friday and shared by his campaign PAC on Tuesday.

He called the board’s recognition of the outlets’ work “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” and alleged that the awards were “based on blatantly fake, derogatory and defamatory news.”

The newspapers received the Pulitzers for their reporting examining Russian interference into the 2016 presidential campaign.

Since October, Trump has pressed for the Pulitzers to be revoked, awards he claims were given “for totally incorrect reporting” which “have become worthless and meaningless.”

At the time of that statement, the Pulitzer Prizes said that the board “has a standing process for reviewing questions about past awards, under the guidelines of which complaints are considered by an appointed committee.”

But on Friday, Trump wrote that “you have an obligation to share with me the status of that supposedly ‘appointed committee’s’ review following its alleged ‘standing process.’”

The Hill has reached out to the Pulitzer Prizes, The New York Times and The Washington Post for comment. 

Also in his Friday letter, Trump made reference to Michael Sussman’s trial saying that the Hillary Clinton campaign’s former attorney was prosecuted for lying to the FBI about “false information purporting to show connections between me and Alfa Bank in Russia.” 

Trump told Miller to “pay close attention to to the testimony at Mr. Sussman’s trial.”

On Tuesday, Sussman was acquitted by a federal jury of a single count of lying to the FBI, marking a significant blow to special counsel John Durham’s investigation into where the FBI’s scrutiny into Trump’s 2016 campaign began.