Things were hopping this weekend, weren't they? Gracious goodness, such a whirlwind of news that other kinds of interesting but nonetheless important in-context news get missed or overlooked
This is where I come in, being the JV clean-up batter around here sometimes.
Doing the headline section on the weekends does have its advantages. Not only do I have the breaking news aspect of whatever has lit the world on fire at the moment, but I can squirrel away little nuggets that I'll pull out later to share and then crack the shells with you all more in-depth.
As POTATUS was issuing his stunning abdication notice and we were keeping a running total of "yeas" and "nays" in Kamala's corner, reports came in that a Florida circuit judge had issued a ruling on a case related to something that goes back a couple of years.
Perhaps you've heard of it?
RUSSIA RUSSIA RUSSIA
Yes, the debunked Russia Hoax, bogus FBI Crossfire Hurricane investigation, and all of the brouhaha started by the Hillary Clinton campaign to insinuate that Trump was a tool of Putin with a campaign chockful of Russian agents. All working in concert to throw the 2016 election in his favor because Hillary was just too scary for Putin to deal with.
Everyone and their mother on the left were in on it, it seemed because it fit into the narrative they needed so badly to be true. There was no way this orange-complexioned, brassy-hued comb-over, bull-in-a-China-shop oaf could possibly be popular enough with voters on his own merits. Not against Hillary.
It had to be RUSSIA RUSSIA RUSSIA.
As Trump would probably say himself, "Many words were written, many beautiful words."
For those beautiful words, in 2018, Pulitzer Prizes were awarded for extraordinary national journalisming.
...The New York Times and The Washington Post each won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting on Monday, capping a newsroom battle last year for scoops on links between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia, the focus of an ongoing special counsel investigation into the 2016 election.
Oh, they were so happy and proud, bedeviling the devil even as he tried to run the country.
Then a funny thing happened. The special counsel investigation everyone had heralded as providing the truth - THE WALLS WERE CLOSING IN ON TRUMP AT LAST - came up empty as far as links between the Trump campaign and Russia. But dang, if it didn't find compelling evidence of plenty of illegal government activity and coordination with the Clinton campaign from the very inception of the FBI's supposed "investigation."
It’s official: The FBI had no verified intel when they went on a massive smear campaign to make the public believe Trump was a Russian asset.
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) May 15, 2023
The biggest threat to America is not ‘white supremacy.’
It’s our government.https://t.co/dXMSewqR9n
A sputtering Adam Schiff tried to do damage control with Special Counsel John Durham and, in an unusual circumstance for such encounters, was put firmly in his place by Durham.
BREAKING: John Durham calls out Adam Schiff to his face regarding the Trump-Russia collusion hoax.
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) June 21, 2023
Schiff: “The son of a presidential candidate gets calls all the time from a foreign government offering dirt on their opponent. Is that what you're saying?”
Durham: “I don't think… pic.twitter.com/JK3cqrIjL7
But wait a minute. Didn't two august institutions of the American press receive prizes for the extraordinary job they did investigating the Russian collusion that had just been proven to be non-existent?
Didn't they?
Well...yeah. But they weren't about to give jack back for being lying sacks of Schlitz.
Not in 2021...
...In 2018, journalists from The New York Times and The Washington Post won a Pulitzer Prize in national reporting for their biased and inaccurate coverage of Russia’s alleged collaboration with the Trump campaign to interfere with the 2016 election, a claim we now know was a hoax. So when are they going to return the prize?
...and in 2022, the Pulitzer Board themselves told Trump to wee up a rope because, as they put it, they'd investigated themselves twice, and everything looked fine.
NOW GO AWAY, ORANGE MAN - YOU BOTHER US
The Pulitzer Prize Board on Monday rejected former President Donald Trump’s yearslong campaign for the organization to strip The New York Times and The Washington Post of the awards they received for their reporting on Russian election interference.
The board made that decision after two separate, independent reviews found that the award-winning reporting on Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential contest between Trump and Hillary Clinton stood up to scrutiny.
“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 Pulitzer board said in a press release.
It had always worked before, this dismissal of the unworthy - and there was no one more so than Trump. They'd seen to that.
Look, the Russia collusion hoax achieved its goal. There's no going back now that it's been completely debunked.
— Fusilli Spock (@awstar11) May 15, 2023
What it does expose is the willingness for our government & media to abandon all sense of ethics, duty and purpose to achieve their political goals. https://t.co/8hqO4ykB0x
What the media, Democrats, progressives - the entire lot of them fail to learn time and again from every encounter is the man's tenaciousness.
He filed a defamation lawsuit against the Pulitzer Board in 2022, and by 2023, media outlets were having a fine time with it finding lawyers to, as they put it, "tear it apart."
Donald Trump recently reminded his supporters that he is suing the Pulitzer Prize Board for rewarding The New York Times and The Washington Post for their coverage of Russian election interference, with the validity of the suit questioned by a legal expert.
Trump filed a suit for defamation in December against the board for jointly awarding the two newspapers the prestigious National Reporting Pulitzer Prize award in 2018 for their coverage of alleged Russian collusion in the 2016 election.
The suit, filed in a court in Okeechobee County, Florida, describes how the "Russian collusion hoax"—allegations that Trump's campaign team worked with Moscow to win the 2016 election—had been "fully and emphatically debunked" numerous times.
...[Corporate attorney Trey] Lovell said that even the merits of the suit are "very questionable" and that Trump may just be filing the suit as part of his efforts to denounce the Russian investigation in any way possible.
I'm curious what Mr. Lovell thinks of the news this weekend. It's another lesson in dealing with Trump: don't be smugly brushing him off - you may very well regret it.
Donald Trump scored a significant court win Saturday as a state judge in Florida turned down attempts by the Pulitzer Prize Board to toss out a libel lawsuit Trump filed in 2022 relating to a series of reports in the New York Times and Washington Post on the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.
In a 14-page ruling issued Saturday, Senior Judge Robert Pegg turned down arguments from the prominent journalism awards panel that their decision to bestow the national reporting prize on the staffs of the two newspapers in 2018 amounted to a statement of “pure opinion” rather than fact.
The libel suit does not hinge directly on the articles the Times and Post published about the Trump campaign’s links to Russia or on the decision to award the Pulitzer to the newspapers.
Instead, the case focuses on the board’s decision in 2022 to publicly reaffirm those awards despite repeated complaints by Trump that the the stories contained numerous falsehoods and were undermined by the findings of special counsel Robert Mueller’s two-year investigation into those issues.
Trump appears to have zeroed in on the board’s 2022 statement about the reviews it ordered of the earlier prizes because Florida law has a two-year statute of limitations for defamation cases.
This means the Trump team now has right to discovery.
...The rulings mean Trump’s suit will likely continue into a discovery phase, where the former president’s lawyers will be able to question Pulitzer board members about discussions related to the awards to the Times and Post. Trump’s attorneys are also expected to seek to expose who conducted the two reviews the board said it commissioned that reaffirmed the accuracy of the newspapers’ work.
As Spanky would say...
The last thing on EARTH the press and media need right now - in the middle of a disastrous presidential campaign season where they've been completely exposed as the arche co-conspirators in massive plots to install and maintain an animatronic cadaver as President of the United States and facilitated the coup that replaced him (all to the risible cry of "saving democracy") - is to have their filthy little secrets and names named in an open court of law.
I wouldn't doubt it's also why this took a bit of time to break into the news cycle instead of just Trump's tweet on Truth Social, which is where I first learned of it, but could find nothing for hours afterward.
Breaking: A Florida Judge denied the Pulitzer’s attempt to dismiss Trump’s defamation lawsuit against them
— johnny maga (@_johnnymaga) July 21, 2024
Trump sued the Pulitzer Prize board for wrongfully giving their award to propagators of Russiagate pic.twitter.com/7OACwr0wp0
I'm sure no one wanted to write this story.
Corn futures are going to go through the roof.
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