A Republican senator is demanding accountability from the press after new revelations about the origins of the Russia collusion narrative.
Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin said reporters who pushed the debunked story that Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory was aided by Russia should return their Pulitzer Prizes, The Hill reported.
“I want the press to be honest. I want Pulitzer Prizes to be returned,” Johnson said Tuesday on NewsNation’s “The Hill.” “They were either duped or complicit in pushing that false narrative that put America in political turmoil for years.”
Johnson was responding to explosive revelations from Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
According to a news release from Gabbard’s office on Friday, declassified documents show that former President Barack Obama and senior officials intentionally politicized intelligence in December 2016.
The goal, Gabbard said, was to delegitimize then-President-elect Trump and lay the groundwork for what she called “a years-long coup.”
Gabbard cited internal intelligence community assessments prior to the election that stated Russia was “probably not trying” to “influence the election by using cyber means.”
Despite that, on Dec. 9, 2016, Obama convened a high-level meeting with top national security officials, including then-DNI James Clapper and then-CIA Director John Brennan.
Should these reporters return their Pulitzers?
Following that meeting, Clapper’s assistant sent a directive to intelligence agencies to draft a new assessment on “tools Moscow used” to interfere with the election, “per the President’s request.”
“The facts reveal this new assessment was based on information that was known by those involved to be manufactured,” Gabbard’s statement said.
“This was politicized intelligence,” she added, noting it was “used as the basis for countless smears seeking to delegitimize President Trump’s victory.”
Gabbard called the operation a “treasonous conspiracy” and vowed that every official involved “must be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
In 2018, the Pulitzer Prize Board awarded its national reporting prize jointly to The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Reporters at the far-left outlets were praised for their “deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage” of “Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign.”
Johnson wants those awards returned.
“It’s continuing to go on,” he said. “All based on a Hillary Clinton dirty trick, the Steele Dossier that those guys knew was a dirty trick.”
Tuesday, Trump accused Obama of “treason” for being behind a scheme to kneecap his first term.
“Based on what I read, and I read pretty much what you read, it would be President Obama. He started it,” Trump told reporters.
He added, “This was treason. This was every word you could think of. They tried to steal the election. They tried to obfuscate the election.”
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