NSA Director told FBI Russian collusion report was ‘wrong’

The Pulitzer Prize is supposed to be awarded for journalistic excellence, which would mean getting all the facts right.

We are now finding out that the journalists who won the Pulitzer Prize for their report on Trump’s alleged Russian collusion were debunked by an administration official.

WaPo Journalists Win Pulitzer

In April 2018, the Washington Post was giddy that the most prestigious award in journalism was going to members of its team.

That year, the Washington Post actually won two Pulitzer Prize awards. The first was for the Russian collusion story about the Trump campaign, and the second was a report on Republican candidate Roy Moore and the sexual misconduct allegations made against him.

Multiple journalists contributed to 10 reports on the subject, including Greg Miller, Ellen Nakashima, Adam Entous, Philip Rucker, Rosalind S. Helderman, Tom Hamburger, Greg Jaffe, Devlin Barrett, Sari Horwitz, Ashley Parker, and Carol D. Leonnig.

Martin Baron, The Post’s executive editor, stated, “These days journalists need a soul and a spine, and the journalists who worked on these had both. They had a soul in seeking and finding the truth, and they had a spine in that they overcame deceit, denial, obstruction and threats. They stood strong throughout that.”

Got It Wrong

Journalists are supposed to have a spine and a soul, but they are also supposed to exhaustively investigate a story before going forward, which was not the case here.

We found out well after the fact via the Robert Mueller report that there was no Russian collusion with the Trump campaign.

The report concluded that while Russia had interfered with the election, investigators “did not find that the Trump campaign, or anyone associated with it, conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in these efforts, despite multiple efforts from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign.”

After the report was released, Trump stated, “It was just announced there was no collusion with Russia. It was a complete and total exoneration.”

I Told Them

Sadly, the Washington Post journalists did not have their prizes revoked even though they got their story wrong. And now we are finding out there was pushback in real-time from the NSA Director.

Former National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers informed the FBI that the report in the Post was “wrong.”

Another part of the story was that Trump was pressuring Rodgers to deny the story, with the insinuation being that Trump wanted Rogers to lie, which he also denied. He testified, “But I will make the following comment. In the three-plus years that I have been the Director of the National Security Agency, to the best of my recollection, I have never been directed to do anything I believe to be illegal, immoral, unethical, or inappropriate. And to the best of my recollection, during that same period of service I do not recall ever feeling pressured to do so.”

How could they possibly get this story that wrong? But then we are reminded that this was during a time when our mainstream media was more or less state-run media, doing the Democrat's dirty work to try to take out Trump. The entire report is on Just the News, and when you have about 15 minutes, I highly encourage you to read it because, to me, it seems like these journalists did little investigating and seemed to report what they wanted to be true rather than the actual truth.