President Donald J. Trump has threatened to sue the Pulitzer Prize Board if the prizes that were previously awarded to the New York Times and Washington Post for their reporting on the debunked “Russian collusion” story are not rescinded.
Breitbart reports that the former president’s lawsuit was announced in a letter released on Tuesday, written by Trump and addressed to Pulitzer administrator Marjorie Miller. In the letter, President Trump says that “There is no dispute that the Pulitzer Board’s award to those media outlets was based on false and fabricated information that they published.” As such, Trump said that “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.”
The prizes were first issued to the two newspapers in 2018, a year before Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel report came out and exonerated President Trump of the accusations of “collusion” with Russia in the 2016 election, as well as additional claims of obstruction of justice. President Trump first called on the Pulitzer board to revoke its prizes last year.
In his new letter, President Trump cited the recent trial of former Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, who was charged by John Durham’s Special Counsel investigation with one count of lying to the FBI over his involvement in the spreading of the “collusion” hoax. On Tuesday, a Washington D.C. jury acquitted Sussmann, although it was noted that the jury was irrevocably biased due to including three donors to the Clinton campaign, as well as a donor to Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and a woman whose daughter is on the same sports team as Sussmann’s daughter.
“We gain more and more clarity with each passing day about the propaganda and falsehoods that were pushed by the Clintons and their willing accomplices in the media about the ‘collusion’ that never existed between me, my campaign, my administration, and the Russian government,” Trump continued.
“I again call on you to rescind the Prize you awarded based on blatantly fake, derogatory and defamatory news,” Trump concluded in his letter. “If you choose to not do so, we will see you in court.”