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It is June of 2022, and Donald Trump is still flapping his yap about the 2018 Pulitzer Prize.
Specifically, he’s demanding that the Pulitzer Board rescind the award it gave to the New York Times and Washington Post 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.”
“There is no dispute that the Pulitzer Board’s award to those media outlets was based on false and fabricated information that they published,” he huffed, in a letter obtained by the Daily Caller. “The continuing publication and recognition of the Prizes on the Board’s website is 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.”
This isn’t even the first time he’s threatened to sue the Pulitzer people over the four-year-old prizes. His attorney Alina Habba sent at least one “spoiliation” letter in 2021, and we’ve been LOL-ing hard at it ever since. Perhaps that’s why this nastygram came from Trump personally — or maybe he just got tired of paying when Habba’s threats failed to get results. But for whatever reason, Trump is back to shout ahistorical non-sequiturs and fantastical legal threats in the general direction of the prize team.
What he hasn’t done is sue the Pultizer Board, much less the Post and the Times for defamation. Maybe he’ll get around to it after he finishes getting his ass kicked by Twitter and the New York Attorney General.
The letter is dated May 27, and spends several paragraphs rehashing what Trump imagines to be relevant, not to say damning, evidence from the Michael Sussmann trial.
“The Russia hoax was a dirty campaign trick promulgated by Crooked Hillary Clinton and her associates. I never had any relationship with Alfa Bank — any claim otherwise is a total scam,” he babbles, adding that Perkins Coie lawyer Marc Elias “confirmed that he hired Fusion GPS to conduct opposition research on me and my campaign, which resulted in the fake Steele Dossier.”
The problem, as it so often is for Trump, is that objective reality doesn’t line up with the frothy brew he slurps up on rightwing media every day. The server in the basement of Trump Tower that was pinging back and forth with Russia’s Alfa Bank and the Steele Dossier were never predicates for the Russia inquiry. In point of fact, the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation was sparked because Trump campaign “coffee boy” George Papadopoulos got drunk and bragged to an Australian diplomat that the Kremlin had damaging Clinton emails and was going to release them to help Trump. Which they did. These events were documented in one of the very New York Times articles which garnered the paper the Pulitzer in 2018.
Similarly Trump makes a bizarre admonition to the Pulitzer Board to “please carefully study the Report by Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz eviscerating former FBI Director James Comey and former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe over their handling of the Russia hoax as well as the coverage of said report, including scathing reporting of Comey in the New York Times.”
First of all, the Horowitz Report in no wise eviscerated Comey and McCabe. While the IG found problems with the FISA warrant on Trump campaign advisor Carter Page, he concluded that the investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia was appropriately predicated. Lest we forget, Russian agents hacked the DNC and released the emails in an effort to harm Clinton, just as Papadopoulos had predicted. And the president’s own son took a meeting with a Russian agent promising dirt on Hillary Clinton, famously writing, “If it’s what you say it is, I love it.”
But back to the letter. After the line about the “scathing reporting of Comey in the New York Times,” Trump footnotes to an April 13, 2017 article entitled “Comey Tried to Shield the F.B.I. From Politics. Then He Shaped an Election.” The article, by Sharon LaFraniere, Mark Mazzetti and
The former president insists that the prize be revoked, and as evidence that “two alleged news organizations [] have been conclusively and definitively complicit in promulgating lies” he points approvingly to an article which won the prize. You could not make this shit up if you tried.
But boy is the former president ever trying!
“I again call on you to rescind the Prize you awarded based on blatantly fake, derogatory, and defamatory news,” he concludes. “If you choose not to do so, we will see you in court.”
Not for nothin’, but didn’t New York just revise its anti-SLAPP law to make it a lot easier to recover fees in garbage libelslander suits? Cool, cool.
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.
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