Trump sues Pulitzer board for defamation after it defended recipients' stories

Former President Donald Trump filed a defamation suit on Wednesday against the Pulitzer Prize board, pointing to a statement it made backing the reporting of the 2018 winning articles.

Trump had requested the board review its decisions to award the 2018 prizes to the New York Times and Washington Post staffs for reporting on the now-debunked Russia collusion narrative.

The board honored Trump's request and conducted the reviews, after which the organization stood by its original choices, saying "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," according to The Hill.

The former president repeatedly threatened to sue the board over its statement, but only filed the suit on Wednesday. He is seeking an unspecified amount in damages.

"On the facts known to Defendants at the time these reviews were allegedly conducted, it would have been impossible that a single objective, thorough and independent review would have reached such a conclusion, much less two. Defendants knew this and published the Pulitzer Statement anyway," the suit reads.

"A large swath of Americans had a tremendous misunderstanding of the truth at the time the Times' and the Post's propagation of the Russia Collusion Hoax dominated the media. Remarkably, they were rewarded for lying to the American public," it further reads, per the New York Post.

New York Times spokesman Charlie Stadtlander told The Hill that "[t]he mission and responsibility of The New York Times is to report thoroughly and impartially on matters of newsworthy importance. The foreign manipulation of the 2016 elections was both consequential and unprecedented in United States history. Our journalists thoroughly pursued credible claims, fact-checked, edited and ultimately produced groundbreaking journalism that was proven true time and again."

Neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post are defendants in the suit.