The New York Times published yet another botched Russia collusion story this week proving that winning a Pulitzer Prize for fiction doesn't mean you ever have to stop writing it. Nearly a decade after the original hoax, the paper of record is still peddling the same debunked narrative — and still getting basic facts wrong.
You'd think after Special Counsel John Durham's 300-plus page report concluded that "neither U.S. law enforcement nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion," they might, I don't know, update the story. But that would require something the Times abandoned around 2016: journalism.
The latest Times piece continues to misrepresent key facts surrounding the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane investigation. The same investigation, mind you, where the Inspector General found 17 inaccuracies and omissions in the FISA warrant application used to surveil Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
Seventeen. Not one sloppy mistake. Not a typo. Seventeen separate failures — all conveniently running in the same direction.
Former FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith pleaded guilty in 2020 to altering an email in 2017 that was used to justify continued surveillance of Page. He literally doctored evidence. And the Times won awards for reporting built on that doctored evidence. That's like giving a restaurant a Michelin star after the health inspector finds rats in the kitchen.
The Durham report, sent to Congress in spring 2023, laid out the whole rotten mess. FBI informant Stefan Halper — codename "Mitch" — met with Page at a Virginia farm in October 2016. Undercover FBI operative Azra Turk was deployed against Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos. Former FBI agent Peter Strzok was running the show with his now-infamous text messages. And former FBI Director James Comey presided over all of it.
Page himself, in declassified FBI transcripts, said it plainly: "I met with these sanctioned Russian officials, several of which I never even met." The FBI's own records contradicted the story the Times was selling. But the Pulitzer committee didn't ask for receipts.
Page eventually settled his lawsuit — Page v. Comey — for $1.25 million in April 2026, with the case reaching Supreme Court docket 25-705. A Justice Department spokesman said at the time that "no American should ever face covert and unlawful surveillance based on their political view." That's the DOJ admitting it happened. And the Times is still pretending it didn't.
Former Times editor Dean Baquet oversaw the Pulitzer-winning coverage. Former Times reporter Jeff Gerth — an actual award-winning journalist — later wrote a devastating critique for the Columbia Journalism Review exposing how badly his former employer blew the story. When your own alumni are torching your credibility, you've got a problem.
But the Times doesn't have a credibility problem. They have a credibility crater. They got the biggest political story of the decade wrong, won the most prestigious prize in journalism for it, and eight years later they're still writing sequels.
At this point, the Pulitzer isn't an award. It's an alibi.
