The board of the Pulitzer Prizes, journalism’s most prestigious award, on Monday rejected an appeal by former President Donald J. Trump to revoke an award awarded to The New York Times and The Washington Post for reporting on Russian interference in the 2016 election and Russian ties to Mr Trump’s campaign and members of his administration.
The board said in a statement that two independent reviews had found nothing to discredit the prize submissions, for which the two news organizations shared the 2018 Pulitzer for national coverage.
The reviews, part of the formal process the Pulitzers use to investigate complaints about winning entries, were conducted after the board heard from Mr. Trump and other complainants.
“Both assessments were conducted by individuals without any connection to the institutions whose work was being examined, nor any connection to each other,” the board said. “The individual assessments converged in their conclusions: that no passage or headlines, statements or claims in any of the winning entries were discredited by facts that emerged after the awards were awarded.”
“The 2018 Pulitzer Prizes are in national coverage,” the statement concluded.
The winning entries included 20 articles from The Post and The Times on evidence of links between Russian interference and Mr. Trump’s campaign and administration, and Mr. Trump’s attempts to influence investigations into those links.
Mr Trump, who has resisted any suggestion that Russia helped him beat Hillary Clinton, has repeatedly called for the prizes to be lifted. In a letter in October, he said the reporting was “based on false reporting of a non-existent connection between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign.” On May 27, in a letter to Marjorie Miller, the awards administrator, Mr Trump threatened to sue for defamation if the awards were not revoked.
The Post and a spokeswoman for The Times declined to comment. A Trump spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
