Former President Donald Trump is furious that journalists have been awarded for their reporting on the hoax that his campaign colluded with Russia to win the 2016 presidential election and now he is taking action.
The former president has threatened to sue the Pulitzer board if the prizes given to The New York Times and Washington Post are not rescinded, Fox News reported.
“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 said in a letter to Pulitzer administrator Marjorie Miller.
“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,” he said.
“In light of additional recent evidence that the articles for which that prize was awarded contained incontrovertibly false information that misled the public, I again call on your organization to maintain its own credibility by rescinding that prize to The New York Times and The Washington Post,” he said.
The letter was dated May 27 and referred to “additional recent evidence” and asked the board “to pay close attention to the developments in the ongoing criminal trial of Michael Sussman [sic], the former attorney for the 2016 Clinton Campaign.”
But the verdict came in on the Sussman trial on Tuesday.
A jury found former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann not guilty on Tuesday of making a false statement to the FBI in September 2016 when he claimed that he was not working on behalf of any client when he brought information alleging a covert communications channel between the Trump Organization and Russia’s Alfa Bank.
“After a two-week trial, and more than a day of deliberations, the jury found that Special Counsel John Durham’s team had not proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Sussmann’s statement was a lie and that he was, in fact, working on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and technology executive Rodney Joffe when he brought two thumb drives and a white paper alleging a Trump-Russia connection,” Fox News reported.
“The jury included one federal government employee who told the judge they donated to Democrats in 2016 and another government employee who told the judge they strongly dislike former President Trump. Both of those jurors told the judge they could be impartial throughout the trial,” the report added. “The jury also included a teacher, an illustrator, a mechanic, and more. One juror had a child who was on the same high school sports team as Sussmann’s child.”
Durham’s investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia witch hunt has been heating up for months, with many wanting Hillary Clinton and her allies held accountable.
Former Attorney General Barr, who served under President Donald Trump, believes Durham has made progress in his investigation and that more damning information may come out soon.
Barr said that Durham has “dug very deep” into the origins of the FBI’s investigation into disproven claims that then-candidate Trump was colluding with Russia to interfere with the 2016 election and has uncovered “good information.”
“I think the question all along … has been that this was a campaign-dirty-trick to get the government to investigate allegations — scurrilous allegations — about Donald Trump and then leak that right before the election,” Barr said.
“And so that raises two questions: Was the Clinton campaign developing this false information and feeding it in for that purpose? And what was the FBI’s role on this?”
“It tells me that he [has] dug very deep and he has developed some good information and he thinks he can make a criminal case here,” Barr said.