Former National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers told FBI agents that the crux of a Pulitzer Prize award-winning Washington Post story on the Russian collusion hoax was “wrong," according to newly declassified documents obtained by Just the News.

Admiral Rogers, who retired in 2018 after four years as National Security Agency chief and commander of U.S. Cyber Command, spoke with FBI agents and a key member of special counsel Robert Mueller’s team in June 2017, where he threw cold water on a May 2017 story by the Post titled, “Trump asked intelligence chiefs to push back against FBI collusion probe after Comey revealed its existence.”

It is not yet known whether the Post had been told prior to the May 2017 publishing of their story that Rogers was denying their characterization of his talk with Trump, but it is now known that Rogers was telling federal investigators in June 2017 that the story was bogus.

The Post story — now known to have been directly refuted by one of its main subjects the month after it published — would go on to be among the Russiagate stories published by the outlet to win a Pulitzer Prize in 2018. Trump is currently suing the Pulitzer Board for defamation for continuing to defend the awards it gave to this collusion-related story and numerous others. A Florida circuit court judge denied the Pulitzer Board’s motion to delay President Donald Trump’s defamation lawsuit against them on presidential immunity grounds.

The newly-released Rogers interview with the Mueller team shows that the then-NSA director was read a quote from The Washington Post article — that “President Trump urged [Rogers] to publicly deny the existence of any evidence of collusion during the 2016 election” — with the FBI notes stating that “Rogers responded that the media characterization was wrong, and the President had asked about the existence of SIGINT [signals intelligence] evidence only.”

The Rogers interview was among hundreds of pages of Crossfire Hurricane documents declassified by President Trump and sent to Congress by FBI Director Kash Patel.

The Pulitzer Prize Board's website said the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting was awarded to the staffs of the Washington Post and New York Times “for deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect’s transition team, and his eventual administration.”

Among the “Winning Works” was the story that Rogers directly refuted, listed by the Pulitzer Prize website with the title “President asked intelligence chiefs to deny collusion (Washington Post).”

The Pulitzer Prize Board and the Washington Post did not immediately respond to requests for comment by Just the News about the 2017 story and the 2018 award, about whether they had known about the refutation by Rogers, and what their reaction was to this newly-declassified FBI interview by the ex-NSA chief.

Rogers spoke with FBI special agents and with Mueller team deputy special counsel Aaron Zebley on June 12, 2017, where Rogers recounted the phone call he had with Trump on March 26, 2017.

Rogers said he received a call around 1:00 or 1:30 PM saying Trump wanted to speak with him, so he went to his office and called Trump back at the White House. Rogers said he had his deputy, Richard Ledgett, listen in on the call.

Ledgett wrote up a memo of the call after it occurred, and both Ledgett and Rogers signed the memorialization of the conversation, with the FBI notes stating that “ADM Rogers explained he felt the memo appropriate because getting a call from the President on a Sunday afternoon is a little unusual and he assumes that whatever he does will become public at some point, so he wanted to make sure it was captured accurately.”

Rogers confirms falsity of news stories

The FBI interview notes show that Rogers’ refutation of the Washington Post story was based not just on his memory but also on the memo he had signed onto.

“ADM Rogers provided the memo to the interview team, and Deputy Special Counsel Zebley read the memo out loud line-by-line, asking ADM Rogers at various points to confirm the content… ADM Rogers affirmed the memo was a true and accurate reflection of the call,” the FBI notes say, with the NSA chief making his refutation based upon both his “recollection of the call and the memo.”

Rogers told the Mueller team that, during the call, “President Trump expressed frustration with the ongoing investigation into Russian interference, saying that it made relations with the Russians difficult.” Trump also “disagreed with definitive assertions that the Russians were responsible for the hacks and said it was impossible to tell who was actually responsible for the hacking” and “also said it was making it hard for him to deal with the Russians.”

Media characterization was wrong

The NSA chief said Trump asked Rogers what he thought. “ADM Rogers acknowledged it does make relations difficult, but then explained in detail, but at a high level, the intelligence supporting ADM Rogers' confidence, and the rest of the community's, that the Russians were behind the hacks. President Trump stated they would have to ‘agree to disagree’ on the matter,” the FBI notes state. 

At least one line from Rogers’ remarks is then redacted, citing “OGA” or “Other Government Information” — meaning information from an unnamed U.S. intelligence agency.

“President Trump then asked ADM Rogers if he would say ‘that’ publicly. Rogers interpreted ‘that’ to mean [OGA],” the FBI notes state. “ADM Rogers told President Trump he could not do that, as he did not and could not discuss USPERS [U.S. persons] in unclassified settings. President Trump did not ask him to 'pushback' on the investigation itself, but he clearly did not agree with the assessment of Russian involvement. During the call, ADM Rogers said to President Trump, 'You want me to be truthful, right?' President Trump never suggested otherwise, but said he wanted to make sure there was no doubt about his involvement."

The FBI notes say that Rogers then proceeded to shoot down The Washington Post story: “The interviewing team read to ADM Rogers a quote from a media source that stated ‘President Trump urged [Rogers] to publicly deny the existence of any evidence of collusion during the 2016 election’ and ADM Rogers responded that the media characterization was wrong, and the President had asked about the existence of SIGINT [signals intelligence] evidence only.”

Rogers also detailed a meeting at the White House with Trump on April 13, 2017.

“Following the briefing, President Trump asked ADM Rogers to stay behind to have a private conversation. In that private conversation, the President repeated much of the same content discussed in the March 26, 2017 telephone call, but he didn't ask for anything or direct ADM Rogers to do anything,” the FBI notes state. “ADM Rogers described the conversation as President Trump ‘venting’ and recalled President Trump saying something like the ‘Russia thing has got to go away.’ He also recalled President Trump saying something similar to ‘I have done nothing wrong.’ ADM Rogers responded that the quickest and best way to make the investigation end is to make sure the investigation was done.”

The FBI notes state that “ADM Rogers closed by stating he believes the President truly believes the government will never really know who is responsible for the hacking incidents during the 2016 Presidential election and that he himself has done nothing wrong.”

The Washington Post article which Rogers shot down was authored by Adam Entous, now with the New York Times, and Ellen Nakashima, who is still with the Post.

Post claims it is "evidence"

The Post had reported in the story that “President Trump asked two of the nation’s top intelligence officials” — Rogers and now-ex Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats — “in March to help him push back against an FBI investigation into possible coordination between his campaign and the Russian government.” The outlet repeatedly cited anonymous sources, reporting that Trump appealed to Rogers and “urg[ed] [him] to publicly deny the existence of any evidence of collusion during the 2016 election.” The outlet said Rogers “refused to comply with the request” which he “deemed to be inappropriate.”

The Post claimed that its story, “add[ed] to a growing body of evidence that Trump sought to co-opt and then undermine Comey before he fired him” in May 2017.

The NSA reportedly declined to comment to the Post at the time, citing the ongoing Russian collusion investigation.

“The White House does not confirm or deny unsubstantiated claims based on illegal leaks from anonymous individuals,” a White House spokesman told the outlet at the time. “The president will continue to focus on his agenda that he was elected to pursue by the American people.”

Schiff perpetuates bogus story

The outlet also quoted former Rep. Adam Schiff, then the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, who called the Post’s refuted claims “yet another disturbing allegation that the President was interfering in the FBI probe.” The Post also said that anonymous “current and former senior intelligence officials viewed Trump’s requests as an attempt by the president to tarnish the credibility of the agency leading the Russia investigation.”

Schiff was eventually censured in 2023 by his congressional colleagues in the House for repeatedly making false allegations based on the bogus dossier — including reading portions of the false dossier claims on the floor of the House.

Senate Democrats asked Rogers during a June 2017 hearing about whether Trump had asked Rogers to downplay the FBI’s collusion investigation. “I am not going to discuss the specifics of any interaction or conversations I may or may not…have had with the President of the United States,” Rogers 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.”

Mueller’s 2019 report, citing the team’s 2017 interview with Rogers, said that “Rogers did not perceive the President’s request to be an order, and the President did not ask Rogers to push back on the Russia investigation itself.”

The citation of the Rogers interview fell within the Mueller report’s second volume — on the possible obstruction of justice. Mueller declined to reach a conclusion on whether Trump had obstructed justice, but then-Attorney General William Barr and then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein determined that the evidence did not support any obstruction charge.

John Durham also interviewed Rogers for his own special counsel investigation.

“Admiral Mike Rogers served as the Director of NSA during the relevant time period. When asked about any awareness he had of any evidence of collusion as asserted in the Steele Reports, he stated that he did not recall any intelligence that supported the collusion assertions in that reporting, nor did he have any discussions during the Summer of 2016 with his counterparts in the intelligence community about collusion between the Russians and any Republicans,” Durham’s 2023 report concluded.

Trump repeatedly called upon the Pulitzer Prize Board to rescind the award for the Russiagate stories by the Washington Post and New York Times, including an October 2021 letter to the Board which said that the stories were “based on false reporting of a non-existent link between the Kremlin and the Trump Campaign.”

Pulitzer Board circles the wagons

The Pulitzer Board doubled down in July 2022 on the awards it had given the outlets for their Trump-Russia collusion stories.

“The Pulitzer Prize Board has an established, formal process by which complaints against winning entries are carefully reviewed. In the last three years, the Pulitzer Board has received inquiries, including from former President Donald Trump, about submissions from The New York Times and The Washington Post on Russian interference in the U.S. election and its connections to the Trump campaign — submissions that jointly won the 2018 National Reporting prize,” the Board wrote at the time. 

“These inquiries prompted the Pulitzer Board to commission two independent reviews of the work submitted by those organizations to our National Reporting competition. Both reviews were conducted by individuals with no connection to the institutions whose work was under examination, nor any connection to each other. The separate reviews converged in their conclusions: that 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.”

Despite what we now know, the Board concluded that “the 2018 Pulitzer Prizes in National Reporting stand.” Trump soon made it clear he would be filing a lawsuit against the Board, including during an October 2022 rally in Texas.

"You notice nobody talks about it? And yet they gave out the Pulitzer Prize for reporting on the Russia hoax. OK? Reporting on Russia, Russia, Russia. So, you have reporters from the Washington Post and New York Times that got Pulitzer Prizes, and they reported the exact wrong thing. So, within the next two weeks, we're suing the Pulitzer organization to have those prizes taken back. We'll be doing that over the next two weeks. I think it's a very good lawsuit, but we'll see,” Trump told the crowd at the time.

“Think of it. They got the Pulitzer Prize for wrong reporting. … They give Pulitzer Prizes to the people that got it wrong. Remember this, by allowing these people that got Russia, Russia, Russia wrong, they're actually libeling me because they're saying they got it right,” Trump said.

Trump sued the Pulitzer Prize Board for defamation in a Florida court in December 2022. “A large swath of Americans had a tremendous misunderstanding of the truth at the time the Times’ and the Post’s propagation of the Russia Collusion Hoax dominated the media,” Trump’s complaint stated. “Remarkably, they were rewarded for lying to the American public.” 

Trump’s lawyers also wrote that the Board’s July 2022 statement in defense of its awards was published with "knowledge or reckless disregard for its falsity" and that the Board members "knew that the Russia Collusion Hoax had been thoroughly discredited numerous times by exhaustive, credible, official investigations” which had contradicted what the Board had said about the articles they had bestowed awards upon.

The legal battle has continued since, with Trump’s lawsuit surviving challenges thus far. Ironically, the Pulitzer Prize Board, which has in the past awarded journalists for doggedly pursuing hidden information, submitted a filing in Florida’s Okeechobee County in January asking for a protective order to keep discovery materials confidential, alleging that Trump sought to "misuse the discovery process in this case to embarrass Defendants and the media more broadly."

Trump’s lawyers responded with their own court filing in February, arguing that the "Defendants again seek to wrongfully prevent President Trump, for the fourth time, from obtaining discovery and proceeding with this case by improperly asserting Presidential immunity against him as plaintiff. That request is unlawful, and has no basis in the U.S. Constitution or the law of Florida.” 

Florida Circuit Court Judge Robert L. Pegg on March 10 denied the Pulitzer Prize Board’s “Motion to Temporarily Stay Civil Action Given Plaintiff’s Status as President of the United States.” The judge rejected this effort to pause Trump’s lawsuit until after his second presidential term ended. 

“Should the duties of the president interfere with his ability to perform his obligations in this action, he is certainly entitled to seek appropriate relief,” Judge Pegg wrote. “Should he not do so, yet not comply with the rules of this court, defendants may apply for the appropriate sanctions as they would against any other plaintiff.” 

A spokesperson for the Pulitzer Board lamented on March 11 that “allowing any president to pursue civil claims against private citizens in state court while simultaneously claiming that private citizens cannot pursue civil claims against him in the same exact court is extremely troubling and should raise concerns for all Americans” and said the Board “is evaluating next steps and remains committed to continuing our defense of journalism.”

Team Trump declaring victory

“This latest ruling is an unequivocal victory for President Donald J. Trump in his pursuit of justice against the Pulitzer Prize board members for their dishonest and defamatory conduct,” Trump lawyer Quincy Bird said in response to the judge’s decision to allow the case to continue for the time being. “President Trump is committed to holding those who traffic in fake news, lies and smears to account and he looks forward to seeing his powerful cases through to a just conclusion.”

Retired Admiral Rogers had also previously expressed a certain level of skepticism about an element of the U.S. intelligence community’s 2017 assessment of alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election, and also held a dim view of Christopher Steele’s discredited dossier — rejecting efforts by since-fired FBI Director James Comey to include the dossier’s baseless collusion claims in the body of the assessment.

It remains to be seen whether the falsity of the award-winning reports by the Post and Times rises to the level of "knowing falsity" required by the First Amendment.