In 2022, President Donald Trump sued the Pulitzer Prize Board members, but that is now coming back to haunt him.
Law&Crime reported Monday that the board members' legal counsel is subpoenaing the full, unredacted copy of former special counsel Robert Mueller's report to verify claims Trump made were "defamatory."
Trump has filed several demands for depositions from board members in Okeechobee County, Florida, but the defendants formally sought the report as well as "all documents and communications exchanged between" Trump and Mueller's team.
The request "includes but is not limited to […] any negotiation" with Mueller about Trump's records or his "answers to written questions," the 2016 hack of the DNC by Russians, and the WikiLeaks dump that followed, information on the Trump Tower Moscow project, Trump Jr.'s 2016 Trump Tower meeting, and more, quoted Law&Crime.
According to Trump, the Pulitzer board is responsible for reports by the New York Times and the Washington Post, which won awards for their 2017 coverage of the Russia scandal that the president still disputes. Trump continues to demand that the paper's prizes be rescinded, even nine years later.
Since the Pulitzer Prize is the "pinnacle of American journalistic achievement," Trump claimed that the award "carries very important connotations," and comments from board members "damaged" his "reputation, profession, and business." They allegedly "wrongfully imply criminal" and "un-American conduct" by Trump around what he calls the "Russia Collusion Hoax."
"The Pulitzer Prize Board has an established, formal process by which complaints against winning entries are carefully reviewed," the board told Trump when he first filed the lawsuit.
The board said that it commissioned "two independent reviews of the work submitted by those organizations to our National Reporting competition. Both reviews were conducted by individuals with no connection to the institutions whose work was under examination, nor any connection to each other. 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 Mueller report, made public, never alleges collusion between Trump and Russia. Instead, it highlights "numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign." So, the members requested access to that full, unredacted report.
Read the full report here.
