Trump Sues Pulitzer Prize For Defamation

Former President Donald Trump has filed a defamation lawsuit against the Pulitzer Prize board for jointly awarding the New York Times and Washington Post the 2018 National Reporting prize over their coverage of the Russia collusion scandal.

The NY Post reports Trump’s lawsuit, filed Tuesday in Okeechobee County, Florida, claims that the “demonstrably false connection was and remains the stated basis” for the papers’ award-winning coverage.

“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.” 

The Washington Post and the Times received the award for their “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. 

The coverage sparked a lengthy investigation led by former special counsel Robert Mueller that ultimately failed to find enough evidence to indict Trump’s campaign team for colluding with Russia to sway the 2016 election.

The complaint said Mueller’s failure to find any evidence of collusion and the Department of Justice’s report that found wrongdoing among federal officials investigating the alleged Russian collusion prove that the stories are not award-winning.

The lawsuit also claims that the actions of those involved in the discredited “Steele dossier” — including former Hillary Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann, who was accused of lying to federal investigators about Trump’s ties to a Russian bank — also demonstrate the coverage is not worthy of an award.

“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 to mislead the public and tarnish President Trump’s reputation and political prospects,” the complaint said.