For the president, this line of argument had some lasting value. More than a year after The Post’s story, he was still indirectly referring to it:

Some housekeeping: Trump was inaccurately abridging the story. The Obama White House didn’t do “nothing”; for instance, there was a “series of warnings” to the Russians about their activities that headed off more invasive Russian actions, according to President Barack Obama’s defenders. And the counter-Russia effort was hobbled by congressional Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who resisted a move to tell the public about Russian interference.

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In any case, Trump has now flip-flopped on the importance of the Obama-feckless-against-Russia story:

Yes: That Obama-Russia story was part of the prize-winning submission from The Post that Trump now wants “taken away.” See all the stories here. There’s a whole range of fare relating to short-lived national security adviser Michael Flynn; how Trump dictated a misleading statement about that now-famous Trump Tower meeting with Russians in June 2016; Jared Kushner’s meetings; plus a lot of other fare.

The whole Pulitzer thing came under attack a week ago, after Attorney General William P. Barr issued a summary of Mueller’s report indicating that prosecutors “did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” Conservative media types, therefore, blasted the Pulitzer distinction. “America’s blue-chip journalists botched the entire story, from its birth during the presidential campaign to its final breath Sunday — and they never stopped congratulating themselves for it,” wrote Sean Davis in the Wall Street Journal, citing the prizes.

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Fox News host Sean Hannity said this on March 25: “The Washington Post, the New York Times — believe it or not, they actually won Pulitzer Prizes for their lying coverage of the Russia collusion hoax. That is a disgusting disgrace and a dishonor to every person that deserved a real Pulitzer Prize.”

There was a lot more Pulitzer-bashing that preceded Trump’s Twitter swipe. That’s because it’s so easy: Far better to slam the clubby, prestigious awards of the newspaper industry, after all, than to grapple with the true information in the stories that received distinction. Those stories conveyed a lot of information, a lot of lying, a lot of evading and a lot of failing. To take an example, consider a May 18, 2017, story in the New York Times’s submission. Under the headline, “Trump Team Knew Flynn Was Under Investigation Before He Came to White House,” the piece showed that Flynn assumed his post as national security adviser even though he “told President Trump’s transition team weeks before the inauguration that he was under federal investigation for secretly working as a paid lobbyist for Turkey during the campaign, according to two people familiar with the case.”

Absolutely nothing in the Barr summary undercuts those findings.

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The Hannitys and Trumps of the world prey on a conceptual gulf in their denunciation of this Pulitzer-winning journalism. During his investigation, Mueller was acting as a prosecutor seeking to gather evidence that various individuals may have committed crimes. On the cooperation/conspiracy/collusion front, he and his staffers did not establish such wrongdoing. On the obstruction-of-justice front: “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him,” notes the Barr summary, quoting from the Mueller document.

In the Pulitzer submissions for The Post and the Times, there’s a lot of conduct that may not clear the bar for a criminal prosecution. A great deal of it, however, clears the bar for merely incompetent, ill-informed and generally harmful activity.

Again, not all of that activity falls on one side of the political divide. One of the articles in the Times submission bears the headline, “Comey Tried to Shield the F.B.I. From Politics. Then He Shaped an Election.” The story bears details on how then-Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch urged then-FBI Director James B. Comey to speak publicly about the criminal investigation addressing Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. “At the meeting, everyone agreed that Mr. Comey should not reveal details about the Clinton investigation,” noted the story. “But Ms. Lynch told him to be even more circumspect: Do not even call it an investigation, she said, according to three people who attended the meeting. Call it a ‘matter.’”

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As he interviewed Trump last week, Hannity reminded his interlocutor of this special moment: “And remember, the interaction between Comey and Loretta Lynch, when he said it’s an investigation, she said, no, it’s a ‘matter.’ ” A Pulitzer endorsement from Hannity!