Pulitzer Honoring Unhinged Conspiracy Theories
How the Awards Organization Favored Political Narratives Over Facts
Several years ago, a professional acquaintance shared his experience as a judge on the Pulitzer Prize board. “The entire existence of the Pulitzer award,” he explained to me, “is to validate the work of the New York Times.” He said it is expected the New York Times will be recognized in one or more categories. “One year, the Times didn’t win a particular award. We [the judges] thought it fell short of the competition,” he said. The aftermath shocked him. “We were called on the carpet. Pulitzer staff were furious with us. The Times was supposed to get this one award we were told. And we screwed up,” he related. “This is amazing. Would you go on the record with this?” I asked. “Are you kidding me?” he replied. “I still have to work with these people.”
I often think of this conversation when I see a reference to the Pulitzer. Many already know the sad history of the Pulitzer Prize organization. When irrefutable evidence was presented that confirmed New York Times Moscow bureau chief Walter Duranty lied in his dispatches (covering up the Soviets’ Holodomor genocide of the Ukrainian people) that were recognized with the 1932 award, the Pulitzer organization refused to revoke the award. Historian Mark von Hagen of Columbia University, sponsor of the Pulitzer award, reviewed Duranty’s worked and recommended the Pulitzer Board “should take the prize away.” The New York Times disagreed. The Pulitzer organization ignored the recommendation.
Controversy continues today. The Pulitzer Prize Board gave the 2018 award for National Reporting jointly to the New York Times and Washington Post. The recognition was for their reporting on the alleged conspiring, coordination, and collusion between the Donald Trump presidential campaign and the Russian government with the goal of electing Trump president at the expense of Hillary Clinton. The papers implied Trump and many in his inner circle were beholden to Vladimir Putin.
In bestowing the award, the Pulitzer judges praised the two papers. The judges wrote “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.”
The irony of the Pulitzer judges’ “deeply sourced” claim was the papers’ combined 20 stories included references to more than 325 anonymous or unnamed sources. Oftentimes, the only named sources in their stories directly contradicted their anonymous reporting. Still, the Pulitzer judges, like the two newspapers, believed the narrative outweighed verifiable facts.
This time period in American journalism was very troubling for journalists in pursuit of the truth. Matt Taibbi, whose liberal bonafides are unquestioned having worked for or appeared on Rolling Stone, MSNBC, and Democracy Now! observed “the ‘more neutral approach’ to reporting ‘went completely out the window once Trump got elected. Saying anything publicly about the story that did not align with the narrative—the repercussions were huge for any of us that did not go there. That is crazy.’”
As it has been firmly established in the years since the 2016 election, there was no coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. This reality of no collusion debunks the entire premise of the reporting by the two Pulitzer prize recipients that Donald Trump, his campaign, and his circle of friends, supporters, and acquaintances conspired with the Russians to steal the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton. It also shatters the illusion the Pulitzer Board operates in a fair and impartial manner.
The truth of the 2016 election is much graver than the New York Times and Washington Post allege. There was no Trump-Russia shenanigans. Instead, as court filings by Special Counsel John Durham are slowly revealing, much of the alleged Trump-Russia collusion claims were part of a well-orchestrated effort by numerous individuals, organizations and government officials aligned with Clinton to damage Trump’s reputation and instigate an FBI investigation.
It's important to emphasize the Clinton smear efforts were aided by government officials. These conspirators include, at a minimum, a senior FBI attorney who altered a document in order to falsely accuse a Trump associate, as was spelled out in that FBI attorney’s federal indictment.
Another pair of Russia hoax collaborators were Democratic Representative Adam Schiff (CA-28) and former CIA director John Brennan, who repeatedly claimed they had knowledge of non-public information confirming the Trump-Russia collusion and this information would become available after investigations were completed. Trump-Russia investigations concluded long ago. Schiff and Brennan have been silent.
Even before Durham’s October 2020 indictments, before his court filings and even before this appointment, there was no shortage of documented evidence that thoroughly discredited the Trump-Russia collusion claims. The most noteworthy was the Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election, March 2019 (Mueller report volume I, volume II), headed by special counsel Robert Mueller.
As I pointed out in Washington Babylon, “Mueller assembled a massive team of nineteen Washington, DC, lawyers, at least a dozen of whom were political donors to Clinton or other Democratic candidates, about forty FBI agents, and dozens of support staff. For nearly two years, an investigation was conducted with well-orchestrated leaks to favored media outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN. More than 2,800 subpoenas were issued, dozens of wiretaps placed, 500 witnesses interviewed, and more than 500 search warrants executed.”
Despite a massive investigation with unlimited access, money and resources, Mueller came up totally empty-handed on the Trump-Russia collusion theory.
Similarly, volumes one, two, three, four, and five of the bipartisan Report on the Select Committee on Intelligence United States Senate on Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016 U.S. Election (Senate report) found absolutely no connection between Trump and the Russians. However, the bipartisan report was critical of the FBI’s sloppy handling of the Steele dossier. The dossier, compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele who was on the Clinton campaign payroll, was a key document the FBI relied upon to open a criminal investigation of Trump:
“The Committee found that, within the FBI, the dossier was given a veneer of credibility by lax procedures, and layered misunderstandings. Before corroborating the information in the dossier, FBI cited that information in a FISA application.”
The committee was also troubled by Steele’s apparent relationship with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a close ally of Vladimir Putin, and for whom Steele may have once worked. The committee was concerned the FBI made itself vulnerable to a “counterintelligence threat” due to Steele’s ties to Deripaska and hence, the Kremlin.
The Justice Department Inspector General reported the FBI knew as early as January 2017 that the material in the Steele dossier was worthless, but the agency - under oath - falsely told the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court otherwise. The FBI also kept this information hidden from the US public.
Yahoo! News reporter Michael Isikoff, who was among the first in the media to report on dossier claims, remarked in 2022 he finally realized the document was not credible.
In an October 2016 meeting, an FBI official offered Steele “up to one million dollars” if he could corroborate any of his allegations in the dossier. Steele never collected the money. He offered no proof to support the dossier.
The Washington Post published a story without any source or attribution in March 2017 buttressing the legitimacy of the dossier by claiming Belarusian businessman Sergei Millian was the source “central to the dossier” who confirmed the “well-developed conspiracy” the Kremlin was working with the Trump campaign. In 2020, Special Counsel Durham disclosed the Post’s Millian claim was entirely fabricated. The Post retracted the story and took the highly unusual act of scrubbing the story completely from the Washington Post archives, as if it never existed.
The nail in the coffin for the Steele dossier was the discovery the primary source for the document admitted he had merely passed on rumors and saloon gossip to Steele as verifiable facts. There was no there there.
By the time the Mueller report was released, about three-dozen people were indicted, convicted, or pleaded guilty to crimes that arose from the Mueller investigation, but not a single one of those crimes involved Russia and the 2016 election. Most of the alleged crimes involved tax law violations, making false statements, and various conspiracy charges. The Mueller investigation did not find one person in the Trump campaign, or the entire Trump orbit, who engaged in any kind of conspiracy, coordination or collusion with Russians, Russian agents, or any other foreigners.
Still, there are those who cling to the unhinged conspiracy theory that Trump must have done something illegal with the Russians. They reference Mueller’s specious claim he could not exonerate Trump of any crimes. But exonerating someone of an accusation – and a politically motivated one at that - is not how our nation’s legal system works.
For over two hundred years, the American judicial system has been built upon a presumption of innocence despite Mueller’s clever wordsmithing to imply otherwise. This includes when there is suspicion, an accusation, investigation, arrest, indictment, criminal charge, and a courtroom trial. Only after an individual has been convicted does the presumption of innocence disappear. The claim Mueller did not “exonerate” Trump during his investigation is a political construct that has no meaning. No one ever needs to be exonerated during a legal proceeding because they are forever presumed innocent until after they are convicted.
An even bigger debacle for Mueller’s investigation was his charging of a dozen Russian citizens and three Russian companies for allegedly hacking the Democratic National Committee (DNC) servers and stealing emails. First, neither Mueller’s investigators nor the FBI had access to the DNC servers despite claims of international hacking. Mueller and the FBI accepted at face value what they were told by CrowdStrike, the firm hired by the DNC to investigate the email loss.
When a CrowdStrike executive testified under oath before the House Intelligence Committee in a closed door session, he admitted his firm “did not have concrete evidence data was exfiltrated from the DNC.” In other words, there was no evidence a hack had even taken place. He further testified that despite having no evidence of Russian involvement it was his company’s “opinion” the Russians were guilty.
It was the CrowdStrike executive’s opinion the Russians were guilty of a hack that his company couldn’t prove had even taken place. Presumably, Mueller knew of this December 2017 admission when Mueller issued his final report nearly 16 months later blaming the Russians for an alleged hack.
Undoubtedly, Mueller probably thought it was a safe gamble to blame the Russians. This is because any Russian he indicted would never see the inside of a U.S. courtroom. They would not voluntarily appear nor would the Russian government allow them to be extradited to the U.S. to stand trial. Mueller could have easily chosen names at random from the Moscow telephone book to accuse because he was confident his indictments were the final word.
However, Mueller gambled unwisely. Two of the accused Russian companies hired attorneys, entered pleas, and requested discovery, as is routinely done in every single criminal case. The Russians called Mueller’s bluff. Fearing litigation would uncover a fraud likely committed by Mueller, the Justice Department quietly dismissed the charges against the Russians. In fact, the charges were dropped on March 16, 2020 when the announcement was lost among the first full week of the coronavirus panic.
No doubt, the Justice Department decision to drop charges against the Russians was also heavily influenced by the actions of Interpol. In July 2019, Yevgeniy Prigozhin and Concord Management Group, LLC, two of the Russian entities indicted by the Justice Department appealed the “Red Notice” the US requested for their immediate arrests if found they were found in any Interpol-participating nation. After a year-long investigation, Interpol found the US case against the Russians lacked evidence a crime had been committed. Further, Interpol found US pursuit of the Russians was “indicative of a politicized character.” Interpol took the very rare action of rescinding the US Red Notice request in July 2020, four months after charges had been dropped.
It's worth mentioning that not everyone accepts Mueller’s (and the press gallery sycophants’) claim – without evidence – Russians hacked the emails. Several members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of retired intelligence officers, claim technical data shows the downloading of the emails occurred at a speed that was impossible to perform over the internet. The only way these emails were copied, they claim, was by physically downloading the emails from the server onto a removable storage device. In other words, an inside job. However, some VIPS members believe their organization cannot definitively make that call. The mystery will continue until new evidence becomes available. Or someone spills the beans.
Mueller didn’t just hang his hat on the unsubstantiated claim Russians stole DNC emails. He also attempted to make the case the Russian Internet Research Agency swung the election in Trump’s favor with its purchase of $100,000 worth of Facebook ads leading up to election day. To be more specific, American Facebook users were exposed to about 3,000 IRA-purchased ads at the same time they received “over 33 trillion stories in their News Feeds” [emphasis added] between June 2015 and August 2017, according to a Facebook executive’s testimony before the Senate.
It’s important to note Mueller did not claim the Russian government was behind the Internet Research Agency in either his report or in his sworn testimony before Congress. But his acolytes in government and the media often made that unsupported claim in public appearances and in newscasts.
Candidates, party committees, and political action committees spent $7.1 billion on advertising, voter outreach, and other election programs. Another $1.4 billion came from dark money and super PACs, nearly all of it for Clinton. All totaled, about $8.5 billion was spent on the 2016 presidential election, but Mueller attempted to make the case $100,000 in Facebook ads decided the election outcome.
The question remains: If there was no evidence to support any of their outlandish claims then why did the New York Times and Washington Post publish so many unsubstantiated stories heavily based on anonymous and unnamed sources implying Trump was a Russian stooge? To its credit, the New York Times was transparent in its game plan for the 2016 presidential race. It was acceptable, the Times argued in an August 2016 column, to abandon impartiality and time-honored journalistic principles when reporting on Trump. The Times lectured journalists “you have to throw out the textbook American journalism” when covering Trump, and admitted “[b]alance has been on vacation” since Trump declared his candidacy.
As for stealing the election, that claim, also without evidence, failed the smell test. The month prior to the 2016 election, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a joint statement that U.S. elections were secure from breach.
In a post-election report coordinated among CIA, FBI, and NSA, the agencies confirmed there was no interference of vote tabulation. The most damning Russian election interference the three agencies could muster were slanted news stories on Russian news outlets Sputnik and RT (formerly Russia Today). As ridiculous as it sounds, more than half of the report’s 13 pages were devoted to RT reporting. Neither Sputnik nor RT are sources Americans turn to for their election coverage. In fact, it is doubtful few Americans can find either Sputnik or RT in the vast ocean of cable channels. To suggest Sputnik and RT are major influencers of US public opinion is patently absurd.
It is worth noting, Russian attempts to meddle in the democratic elections of another nation is not new. A study published nearly a year before the 2016 election reported that between 1946 and 2000, the US and USSR (later, Russia) meddled in the democratic elections of other nations 117 times. The USSR/Russia intervened on 36 occasions and the US interfered more than twice as many times, 81. In other words, it was geopolitics, as usual.
Five years passed before an embarrassed Washington Post reported on a New York University study that undermined the paper’s unfounded claims following the 2016 election that alleged Russian social media trolls had a significant impact on the election outcome. In January 2023, the Post wrote, “Russian influence operations on Twitter in the 2016 presidential election reached relatively few users.”
In summary, the New York Times and Washington Post providing alleged details of a Trump-Russia collusion that didn’t take place is like describing the getaway car of a robbery that never happened.
In the coming days and weeks, many of the Pulitzer-prizing winning stories from the New York Times and the Washington Post will be examined. Facts – verifiable facts – will be presented. Many claims made by the two papers will be debunked as misleading, missing context, false, and possibly manufactured. You can be certain neither newspaper, nor the Pulitzer organization, will be pleased with what the public will learn of all three.
(Update: This article was updated on January 10, 2023 by adding a reference to the New York University study that found Russian media trolls had no impact on the election; and updated on February 18, 2023, adding the note the Washington Post retracted a March 2017 story claiming evidence the Kremlin aided the Trump campaign.)
Mark Hyman is an Emmy award-winning investigative journalist. Follow him on Twitter, Gettr, Parler, Post, and Mastodon.world at @markhyman, and on Truth Social at @markhyman81.
His books Washington Babylon: From George Washington to Donald Trump, Scandals That Rocked the Nation and Pardongate: How Bill and Hillary Clinton and their Brothers Profited from Pardons are on sale now (here and here).
An excellent summary of the fraud that was perpetrated on credulous Americans
Has any of these reporters had any luck locating the dossier's Russian Consulate in Miami aka Superman's Fortress of Solitude? I call it that because either place is just as fictitious. People will rebut and spread FUD that Google shows one. It NEVER existed during all of this. Google has modded a listing for an embassy to include a consular. No one ever asked these talking heads about that one detail, a Russian government building in the U.S. that doesn't exist. THAT is the entire Collusion/Crossfire Hurricane bs in a nutshell. It was close enough for msm and so Pulitzer shrugged. Meh, reality.