On Oct.14, 2020, just weeks before the presidential election, the New York Post published a blockbuster front-page story headlined, “Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad.”
The story by Emma-Jo Morris and Gabrielle Fonrouge exposed the lie in then-candidate Joe Biden’s claim that he had “never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.” The reporters wrote that the correspondence was contained “in a massive trove of data recovered from a laptop computer.”
What happened next was later exposed in the Twitter files and in lawsuits: agencies of the U.S. government manipulated and pressured social media platforms into suppressing and discrediting the story. Twitter (under its former ownership) even locked the account of the White House press secretary to stop the story from being shared.
Fifty-one former intelligence officials signed a letter saying the laptop appeared to be Russian disinformation. Then-candidate Joe Biden cited that letter during a presidential debate to repel questions about the laptop from then-President Donald Trump or the moderator. A media echo chamber repeated endlessly that the laptop was “unverified,” possibly “from the Russians,” “hacked” or “doctored.”
But this week, the U.S. government entered that same laptop into evidence in Hunter Biden’s federal trial on gun charges, and an FBI agent testified under oath that it was authentic, verified and showed no sign of tampering. The bureau has known this, according to IRS whistleblowers, since November 2019.
Can Emma-Jo Morris and Gabrielle Fonrouge pick up their Pulitzer prizes now?
Their accurate reporting on indications of Biden family influence peddling has been borne out by the findings of congressional investigators. This week, the chairs of the House Ways and Means, Oversight and Judiciary committees referred the president’s brother and son to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution for false statements and perjury before Congress. The criminal referral, 65 pages long, says the committees have documented “over $35 million received by Biden family members, their companies, and business associates,” but have not been able to identify any “legitimate services warranting such lucrative payments.”
The committee chairs wrote that the false statements all have one thing in common: “every instance implicates Joe Biden’s knowledge of and role in his family’s influence peddling.”
The referral can be found online at oversight.house.gov.
While the New York Post has an empty shelf in its display case where the journalism awards should be, The New York Times and the Washington Post won Pulitzers in 2018 for National Reporting on Russian interference to help Trump win the 2016 election.
That story turned out to be false, and more than just false, it was based on bogus reports since revealed to have been paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign.
The exhaustive details of the investigations that found no collusion between Trump and Russia can be found in the reports of Special Counsel Robert Mueller (March 2019, Volume I and Volume II), Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz (December 2019, 478 pages) and Special Counsel John Durham (May 2023,306 pages).
So, when are the Washington Post and The New York Times planning to give back the Pulitzers?
Never, it seems, and the august judges of journalism are never going to revoke them. Because that would mean admitting that former President Trump was right.
Trump first called for the awards to be rescinded in 2019, after the Mueller report was released. In July 2022, the Pulitzer board announced that following two independent reviews, the prizes would stand. “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 identities of the Pulitzer board’s reviewers were not revealed. Trump complained that the board was “running cover” for the newsrooms by investigating their reporting “in a veil of secrecy.”
In January 2023, former New York Times reporter Jeff Gerth wrote a four-part article for the Columbia Journalism Review in which he criticized the Times and the Washington Post for their stories in 2017 “that wound up being significantly flawed or based on uncorroborated or debunked information, according to FBI documents that later became public.” Gerth noted that both papers “relied on anonymous sources.”
Trump had already filed a lawsuit against the Pulitzer board. “The Hoax has now been further exposed by the devastating, irrefutable piece in the Columbia Journalism Review, and Pulitzer has no comment,” Trump said, vowing that his lawsuit would “set the record straight.”
Business Insider reported in March that it obtained transcripts of four depositions of journalists taken last year by Trump’s lawyers. The attorneys probed to try to find out who conducted the Pulitzer board’s independent reviews. “At each turn, a lawyer for the Pulitzer board members stopped their clients from answering,” the publication reported.
In 2022, the New York Post editorial board did its own review of the Pulitzer-awarded reporting. “Reading these pieces four years later, one is struck not only by how irrelevant they are, but how schlocky — tinged with a McCarthyist alarmism of a red under every bed,” the ed board wrote. “Two major newspapers that hold themselves up as the pinnacle of press freedom, the ‘truth dies in darkness’ brigade and all that, pushed a conspiracy theory.”
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A Gallup poll released in October found that only 7% of Americans have “a great deal” of trust and confidence in the media. Another 27% say they have “a fair amount.”
But 38% said they have zero trust and confidence in the media, and 28% said they don’t have much.
It doesn’t help that the Pulitzer board continues to defend its indefensible awards to The New York Times and the Washington Post for their “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 anonymously sourced Russia collusion stories were a hoax, nothing but a long-running political dirty trick.
Give back the Pulitzers.
Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley
