The Durham report has revived criticism of the Pulitzer Prizes awarded in 2018 to The New York Times and The Washington Post for their coverage of alleged Trump-Russia links, discredited allegations that have been put to rest by the special counsel’s findings.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, South Carolina Republican, said the Durham report has shown “that The New York Times and Washington Post were given a Pulitzer Prize for writing a bunch of politically motivated crap.”
“When it comes to reporting on Donald Trump, the mainstream media is dead,” he said.
Steve Guest, an aide to Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, said on Twitter that the special counsel’s report shows the 2018 Pulitzer Prizes for national reporting “are utter garbage.”
Asked if the Durham report invalidates The New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize, newsroom and opinion spokesman Charlie Stadtlander responded with a one-word reply: “No.” He did not elaborate.
Post spokeswoman Jennifer Lee said the paper “stands by its reporting.”
The Pulitzer Prize board did not respond to a request for comment.
The prizes were awarded in 2018 “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.”
On Monday, special counsel John Durham released his final report on the origins of the FBI’s counterintelligence probe of alleged Trump-Russia conspiracy. He concluded after four years of investigation that “neither U.S. law enforcement nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion” between the Trump campaign and Russia.
He also said officials demonstrated potential “confirmation bias” in favor of continuing to investigate Mr. Trump and “ignored or simply assessed away” evidence that was consistent with exonerating Mr. Trump of allegations of collusion with Moscow.
Mr. Trump demanded previously that the Pulitzer Prize board rescind the prizes for The Times and The Post. Responding to complaints, the board commissioned two independent reviews of the work by The Times and The Post.
In July 2022, the board said those reviews found “that no passages or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes.”
“The 2018 Pulitzer Prizes in National Reporting stand,” the board said at the time.
The New York Times’ story on the Durham report on Monday said the special counsel “revealed little substantial new information about the [FBI] inquiry.” The story also noted the report’s comment that the FBI “had an affirmative obligation to closely examine” a tip from an Australian diplomat that the Trump campaign had access to dirt on Hillary Clinton from sources in Russia.
• Dave Boyer can be reached at dboyer@washingtontimes.com.
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