The board that awards Pulitzer Prizes released a statement on Monday declining Donald Trump’s request that they strip The New York Times and The Washington Post of a joint prize for their reporting on Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The board said in a statement that they commissioned two independent reviews that “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 staffs of the Times and the Post were awarded Pulitzers for national reporting 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.”
Trump had repeated a “no collusion, no obstruction” mantra in the aftermath of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
But what Mueller’s probe found was that there was insufficient evidence to show that Trump or members of his campaign conspired with the Russian government in election interference activities. When it came to obstruction, Muelller’s report did not render a conclusion, but also stated that it did not exonerate Trump.
The board said that the review was conducted “by individuals with no connection to the institutions whose work was under examination, nor any connection to each other.”