- The Washington Times - Thursday, May 7, 2020

President Trump seized on the dismissal of the criminal case against former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn on Thursday to call for two news organizations to give back the Pulitzer Prizes they won for coverage of the Russia investigation.

“They’re not journalists. They’re thieves,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “All of those journalists that we see with the Pulitzer Prize should be forced to give those Pulitzer Prizes back because they were all wrong. You saw it today, more documents came out saying there was absolutely no collusion with Russia.”

The Justice Department announced Thursday it was dropping its prosecution of Flynn, who had pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI but had been seeking to withdraw his guilty plea.

The Washington Post and The New York Times were awarded journalism’s most prestigious prize for in 2018 for their coverage of the Russia investigation.

At the time, the Pulitzer Prize board commended the news organizations “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.”

The president said it was just more “fake news.”

“Pulitzer Prizes should all be returned because you know what, they were given out falsely,” he said. “Those Pulitzer Prizes should be given back immediately and the Pulitzer committee, or whoever gives the prizes, they’re a disgrace unless they give those prizes back, because they got Pulitzer Prizes for what turned out to be false stories.”

He said the prizes “should be given to the ones that got it right, and I could give you a long list of those names too.”

A two-year-plus investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller found no evidence of collusion between Trump campaign officials and Moscow in the 2016 election.

• Dave Boyer can be reached at dboyer@washingtontimes.com.

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