[commandlinefan]

I honestly don't follow pulitzer prizes, but sampling a few recent years (in the past 20), I can't find any where there was ANY award for investigation against a president (there was one for investigation against Dick Cheney in 2008). Has this ever happened before?

[CydeWeys]

A Pulitzer was awarded for reporting on Clinton's Lewinsky affair: https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/maureen-dowd

And I'm on mobile now but I'm sure they were awarded for some things having to do with the Iraq War.

If presidents commit crimes, that's highly notable (and a big deal).

[yostrovs]

Except that he didn't, which would imply that the journalism was a witch hunt.

[wtallis]

Keep in mind that 8 of the last 20 years were the historically scandal-free Obama presidency. See eg. https://fivethirtyeight.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/atd-I...

The Obama presidency wasn't completely scandal-free, but there wasn't much opportunity for Pulitzer level investigative reporting against him specifically.

[drak0n1c]

There was significant reporting of his administration's spying on journalists:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_articles_about_the_Depart...

[GeekyBear]

It's not so much that there weren't scandals.

It's more about a press corps that let Obama get away with things they would have never given somebody like Trump a pass for.

For example, look at the press reaction to Obama refusing to prosecute CIA torture vs. Trump nominating one of the career officials Obama previously gave a pass to to head up the CIA.

Likewise, I doubt we would give Trump a pass for attempting to move due process free prisons like Gitmo onto American soil.

[danso]

Gina Haspel, the current CIA chief, joined the CIA in 1985 and was not proposed for a permanent leadership position during Obama's time. Obama made a compromise in 2009 to not rock the boat when he entered the office. You expect people to treat this kind of "pardon" as no different than appointing someone to CIA chief? As Dexter Filkins put it: [0]

> When Obama took office, in 2009, he declared that he would not prosecute anyone involved in the C.I.A.’s interrogation programs, not even senior officers, among whom Haspel was one. At the time, Obama said he wanted to look forward and not back. But the past, as Obama well knows, never goes away. With the prospect of American torture looming again, I wonder if Obama regrets his decision. After all, people like Haspel, quite plausibly, could have gone to prison.

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-new-c-i-a-deput...

[GeekyBear]

If Obama had been willing to live up to America's treaty obligations to prosecute torture, there is very little doubt that Haspel would have been one of the people who landed in prison.

>Haspel oversaw a secret “black site” in Thailand, at which prisoners were waterboarded and subjected to other severe forms of abuse. Haspel later participated in the destruction of the CIA’s videotapes of some of its torture sessions.

https://theintercept.com/2018/03/15/washington-breaks-out-th...

However, more to the point, the press reaction to Obama refusing to prosecute those who ordered or carried out torture mostly came down to expressions of disappointment.

If Trump had refused to prosecute Bush officials for their crimes, he would not have gotten a pass.

[asdfasgasdgasdg]

> If Trump had refused to prosecute Bush officials for their crimes, he would not have gotten a pass.

That's not the right analogy though. The question is how the press would have reacted to his decision not to prosecute Obama officials. And given their reaction to his threats to do so ("lock her up" &c), my guess is that they would take it as a sign of maturity if he said, "Look, we're not in the business of trying to throw our political opponents in jail for minor crimes, because this would look like tyranny."

Which is not to say that Haspel's crimes were minor. But I do want to make it clear that it's very different to refuse to prosecute people from "the other team" vs. to give your own team a pass.

[GeekyBear]

It honestly had very little to do with which team we are discussing, as Obama also refused to do so much as fire the CIA officials under his own administration who were caught red handed spying on Congress while Congress was writing their torture report, much less prosecute them for doing it.

James Clapper lied under oath while testifying before Congress about NSA spying, and he suffered no consequences.

We have previously seen baseball players prosecuted for for the relatively trivial offense of lying to Congress about their personal steroid use.

Obama gave our intelligence agencies a free reign to break the law however they liked, without consequence, and I sincerely doubt the press would give somebody like Trump a free pass if his officials were caught pulling the same crap.

[danso]

> If Trump had refused to prosecute Bush officials for their crimes, he would not have gotten a pass.

Since Trump has not made any moves to prosecute Bush officials -- and in the case of Gina Haspel, is actually promoting them -- can you come up with an example based in reality?

[makomk]

Very much this. For example, remember the scandal about illicit adoptions of immigrant kids away from their parents, the one everyone on social media was comparing to kidnapping? If you check the dates, they all happened under Obama. The article was quite open about the fact that they only cared about this now as a way of attacking Trump, and it worked. Similarly, that big scandal about the government losing immigrant kids or placing them with traffickers? You guessed it, Obama-era stuff that was turned into an anti-Trump scandal. That heartwrenching photo of kids in cages which went viral until people realised it was from Obama's time in office? One local news outlet ran when it was actually news. One.

[bduerst]

>Has this ever happened before?

Watergate investigation of President Nixon in 1973: https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/washington-post

[rdhyee]

The first example that comes to mind is the Pulitzer Prize-winning work by the Washington Post around Watergate. Granted, that was almost fifty years ago. See https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/washington-post

[danso]

Watergate is the obvious example. But there haven't been many investigations of presidents – or at least investigations of presidents personally, which seems to be the scope you're asking about. The AP won the 1999 Feature Photography award for its work covering the Lewinsky affair and impeachment hearings [0]. I don't know if I would count Maureen Dowd's award in commentary [1] as specifically challenging the administration. And I think it's arguable that the Clintons' Whitewater controversy had the same amount of "matter" as what President Trump is currently under investigation for, considering Ken Starr's Whitewater probe recommended impeachment for things not directly related to Whitewater (I would agree that Bill Clinton, however, did not get the scrutiny he deserved for Paula Jones and others).

If you expand the scope of "investigation against a president" to include the actions of his administration, then you'll find more examples:

1987 National Reporting Award for the Miami Herald's reporting on Iran-Contra (Bob Woodward of the WaPo was also a finalist on the same topic in this category) [2]

2011 Editorial Writing to the WSJ for its editorials challenging Obamacare [3]

2014 Public Service Award to The Guardian and the WaPo for the Snowden revelations [4]

[0] https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/photo-staff-0

[1] https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/maureen-dowd

[2] https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/staff-21

[3] https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/joseph-rago

[4] https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/guardian-us