Pulitzers rejects Trump demand to revoke WaPo, NYT awards

The Pulitzer Prize board on Monday rejected requests from former President Trump to revoke national reporting awards given to The Washington Post and The New York Times.

Trump had repeatedly asked the board to rescind the 2018 Pulitzer Prizes in National Reporting, which were awarded to the staffs of the two outlets for their reporting examining Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. 

The Pulitzer board commissioned a review of the winning works, but found no reason to pull back the awards.

“The separate reviews converged in their conclusions: 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 board said in a statement.

“The 2018 Pulitzer Prizes in National Reporting stand,” the statement continued.

The board said the review followed an established, formal process to review complaints against winning entries. 

Trump has pressed for the Pulitzers to be revoked since October, labeling the winning stories “totally incorrect reporting” that “have become worthless and meaningless.”

The board said the requests from Trump and others, who they did not name, prompted the reviews, which were conducted by individuals with no connection to the two papers or each other.

The former president has repeatedly lambasted reporting of Russian interference in the 2016 election as a hoax, writing to the board in May that the outlets’ winning work was “a distortion of fact and a personal defamation.”

Trump also said at the time he would file litigation if the board did not “do the right thing on its own.”

The Hill has reached out to a Trump spokesperson for comment.