EXCLUSIVE: One Republican lawmaker is officially calling for the Pulitzer Prize Board to rescind the 2018 award given to The New York Times and Washington Post for their reporting on the now-debunked Russia collusion hoax.

In a Wednesday letter to the board, Rep. Lance Gooden, R-Texas, called for the prize to be stripped from the two liberal outlets, citing the findings of Special Counsel John Durham’s final report on the FBI’s probe that found the agency, as well as the Department of Justice, ‘failed to uphold their mission of strict fidelity to the law’ when it launched the Trump-Russia investigation. 

‘If Pulitzer still believes in maintaining the integrity of its establishment and high standards for its prizes and award recipients, it should promptly undo this mistake by stripping the New York Times and the Washington Post of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize,’ Gooden wrote. 

‘To restore faith in the authenticity of the prize and to clarify the Board’s strong belief in accountability and impartiality, I request the Board ban the Washington Post and the New York Times from any nominations for a minimum of five years. I trust you will do the right thing,’ he added.

READ THE LETTER BELOW. APP USERS: CLICK HERE

In his letter, Gooden noted there was precedent for rescinding an award, specifically mentioning its decision to strip a Washington Post reporter of the 1981 award ‘for inaccuracies in a feature and autobiographical report.’

‘Even if this award was bestowed in good faith, the Board is bound by its duty and ‘mission’ to support accurate and responsible journalism. Now that the truth has been revealed, it is imperative that the Board correct this oversight,’ he wrote.

Gooden’s calls for the award to be rescinded have been echoed by others, including Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., during a recent appearance on Fox News.

‘I think the Pulitzer Prize given to The Washington Post and New York Times should be taken back because the entire episode was politically motivated crap. That’s not something you should get a Pulitzer Prize for,’ Graham told ‘America’s Newsroom.’

Fox News Digital reached out to the Pulitzer Prize Board for comment but did not immediately receive a response.

Fox News’ Brianna Herlihy contributed to this report.

Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., blasted Democratic Senator John Fetterman’s ‘unbecoming’ decision to attend a Senate press conference while wearing a hoodie and shorts.

‘John Fetterman redefined Casual Friday on a Thursday morning,’ Boebert wrote on Twitter. ‘It’s truly unbecoming for someone to show up like that to any job, let alone a job that only 100 people are elected to do.’

The Pennsylvania senator attended a Thursday news conference to discuss debt limit negotiations wearing a white hoodie, gray workout shorts, and running shoes, while standing alongside four fellow Democratic Senators who all were dressed in a suit and tie.

‘There’s just no excuse for it,’ the Colorado Republican said in her tweet blasting Fetterman’s Senate attire.

During his time as Mayor of Braddock and campaign for the Pennsylvania Senate, Fetterman was known for wearing sweats on the job, but raised eyebrows when he showed up to the United States Senate in a hoodie.

Fetterman has been seen wearing a hoodie and shorts in the Senate several times since his return from a six-week hospital stay, where he was being treated for clinical depression.

Fetterman initially checked himself into the hospital in February, and did not return in-person to the Senate until April.

On his first appearance in the chamber since his weeks-long hospital stay, the Senator was seen wearing a black Carhart hoodie and blue casual shorts.

Fetterman’s office didn’t immediately return a request for comment on Boebert’s criticism.  

Among the debate about Fetterman’s controversial Senate attire, Fox News Digital recently reported the Senator’s office doctored his remarks in their transcriptions from several hearings, amid concern over the Senators health.

The FBI improperly used warrantless search powers against U.S. citizens more than 278,000 times in the year ending November 2021, according to an unsealed Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) filing.

U.S. citizens covered in that improper effort included people involved in the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021; George Floyd protesters during the summer of 2020; and donors to a failed congressional candidate, the filing said.

Section 702 of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) allows the government to conduct targeted surveillance of non-U.S. persons located abroad to acquire foreign intelligence information. When U.S. citizens are flagged as part of these investigations, the FBI takes over the process of querying them for possible security reasons.

The court filing, which spanned 127 pages, was unsealed Friday by the FISC, but was filed in April 2022.

‘As Director Wray has made clear, the errors described in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court’s opinion are completely unacceptable,’ a senior FBI official told Fox News Friday. ‘As a result of the audits that revealed these instances of noncompliance, the FBI changed its querying procedures to make sure these errors do not happen again. These steps have led to significant improvement in the way we conduct queries of lawfully obtained Section 702 information.’ 

‘We are committed to continuing this work and providing greater transparency into the process to earn the trust of the American people and advance our mission of safeguarding both the nation’s security, and privacy and civil liberties, at the same time,’ the senior FBI official said.

The FBI has faced scrutiny for the misuse of Section 702, and FBI Director Christopher Wray has said the bureau has taken steps to reform the system.

Fox News Digital first reported last month that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said there was a ‘significant decline’ in the total number of queries the FBI made into U.S. citizens between 2021 and 2022 under Section 702, due to the changes the bureau made to its ‘systems, processes, and training relating to U.S. persons queries.’

In the year ending November 2022, the FBI conducted a total of about 204,000 queries, a 94% drop from the previous year’s reporting period when it conducted nearly 3.4 million.

The filing released on Friday detailed a number of the improper queries, including a batch query for ‘over 19,000 donors to a congressional campaign.’

‘The analyst who ran the query advised that the campaign was a target of foreign influence, but NSD [National Security Division] determined that only eight identifiers used in the query had sufficient ties to foreign influence activities to comply with the querying standard,’ the filing stated.

It is unclear to which congressional campaign the filing is referring. Fox News has learned the candidate was not a member of Congress and did not win his or her election.

The filing also said another batch of queries was made in June 2020, ‘using identifiers of 133 individuals arrested in connection with civil unrest and protests between approximately May 30 and June 18, 2020.’

The civil unrest was due to the death of George Floyd in police custody in May 2020.

‘The query was run to determine whether the FBI had ‘any counter-terrorism derogatory information on the arrestees,’ but without ‘any specific potential connections to terrorist related activity’ known to those who conducted the queries,’ the filing stated.

The filing revealed that an FBI employee ran more than 23,000 queries ‘to find possible foreign influence, although the analyst conducting the queries had no indications of foreign influence related to the query term used.’

The filing said ‘no raw Section 702 information was accessed as a result of these queries.’

Queries can help to ‘find connections between individuals and entities,’ as well as to identify threats to the U.S. homeland or national security interests abroad. Queries also help to identify potential victims of national security threat activity — like possible victims of cyberattacks on U.S. infrastructure by foreign actors.

Between December 2021 and November 2022, the FBI’s queries conducted based on evidence of a crime ‘increased slightly.’ But the number of instances in which the FBI ‘failed to obtain a required court order prior to reviewing the results of certain evidence of a crime-only queries declined.’

The report also shows the FBI opened ‘zero’ investigations into U.S. persons who are not considered a threat to national security in the year ending November 2022.

FISA Section 702 is set to sunset on Dec. 31, and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are proposing reforms in order to reauthorize the section, with more congressional oversight.

FISA reform became a priority for both Republicans and Democrats following a 2019 review from Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz. That review found significant inaccuracies and omissions by the FBI in a FISA warrant application to surveil former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page in 2016, and has proposed significant reforms to FISA Section 702 since.

House Democrats’ campaign arm has launched a new website that targets moderate and vulnerable Republicans for supporting spending cuts outlined in Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s debt ceiling bill.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) unveiled ‘GOPVotedToDefault.com,’ which names 31 Republican members of Congress and accuses them of seeking to cut funding for veterans, Social Security and seniors’ healthcare.

Those are the same attack lines Democrats have been using against Republicans even as Congress and the White House are trying to find an agreement on how to raise the debt ceiling before the government is unable to pay its bills after June 1.

Among those listed is Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, who narrowly won her re-election by just a few hundred votes. Others targeted are Reps. Don Bacon of Nebraska, Ryan Zinke of Montana, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and most freshman New York Republicans.

The website features a prominent timer tracking how many days it’s been since House Republicans passed their Limit, Save, Grow Act, which seeks to raise the debt ceiling by $1.5 trillion while also cutting discretionary spending by roughly $150 billion from this year to the next.

It says underneath, ’31 vulnerable Republicans sided with extremists to hold our economy hostage in order to enact cruel cuts to programs that keep Americans healthy, safe, and secure. See how your congressperson’s default ransom note will impact your district.’

House Republicans have said their bill does not include any of the cuts Democrats are warning about, and have vowed not to reduce funding for veterans’ care or touch seniors’ benefits.

The new online pressure campaign comes just as Democrats are gathering signatures to make an end run around McCarthy to bring a clean debt limit increase to the floor — something every GOP lawmaker has spoken out against.

Their discharge petition, which would allow them to bring a bill to the floor over the speaker’s objections provided it gets 218 signatures, has 210 of 213 Democratic names on it. Rep. Mary Peltola’s, D-Alaska, office told Fox News Digital that she intends to sign it upon her return to Washington, D.C. But to go anywhere, it would need at least several Republicans, which the conference has signaled would be an uphill battle.

The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), the House GOP’s rival to the DCCC, accused Democrats of ignoring their ‘spending crisis’ to launch a partisan online attack.

‘Instead of addressing the spending crisis they created, Democrats spend their time mocking up a microsite full of already debunked lies. Every moment wasted on useless stunts like this is a lost opportunity to work in a bipartisan way to avoid an economic catastrophe,’ NRCC national press secretary Will Reinert told Fox News Digital.

The U.S. Border Patrol has agreed in a legal settlement to not set up interior checkpoints in a northern New Hampshire town just under 100 miles from the Canadian border before Jan. 1, 2025.

The agreement announced Friday settled a 2020 lawsuit over the use of the checkpoints in Woodstock, where the American Civil Liberties Union claimed that border agents conducted illegal searches and seizures that led to the arrest of American citizens for violating state drug laws that had nothing to do with immigration.

‘Border Patrol’s interior checkpoint operations are unlawful and invasive, and this settlement means the people of northern New England will continue to be free from these unconstitutional searches and seizures in Woodstock until January 1, 2025,’ Gilles Bissonnette, the legal director of the ACLU of New Hampshire, said in a news release.

The lawsuit arose from a 2017 case in which 16 people were stopped at a checkpoint on Interstate 93 during a three-day operation that was staffed by Border Patrol officers and local police. They were charged by the state with possession of small amounts of drugs.

In the original complaint, the ACLU said that during the operation in late August 2017 no individual was charged with having unlawfully crossed the border from Canada.

Two of the people apprehended at the Woodstock checkpoint sued. One of them, Jesse Drewniak, a U.S. citizen from Hudson, was returning home from a fishing trip in the White Mountains when he was arrested on a minor drug charge.

A state judge concluded that the primary purpose of the checkpoint was the detection and seizure of drugs, making it ‘unconstitutional under both state and federal law.’ Prosecutors later dismissed the charges.

The settlement announced Friday only applies to Border Patrol checkpoints in Woodstock, said Stephanie Gomory of the Vermont ACLU.

‘The ACLU of Vermont — along with our colleagues in New Hampshire and Maine — will be ready to challenge Border Patrol should they resume these unconstitutional practices in the future,’ she said in an email.

In a statement, U.S. Customs and Border Protection said both sides in the lawsuit reached a ‘mutually beneficial resolution.’

The Border Patrol ‘remains committed to efficiently and effectively utilizing its resources to halt the entry of potential threats into the United States,’ the statement said.

Under federal law, the Border Patrol can enforce immigration laws within 100 miles of the country’s borders. Over the years the agency has set up similar checkpoints in the three northern New England states, but it hasn’t done so since 2019, the ACLU said.

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Michigan’s revenue will be nearly $900 million less this year than forecasted in January due to new tax cuts, state officials said Friday, leaving lawmakers with less money to spend as they work toward the state’s next budget.

The new projections, released Friday at a revenue estimating conference, show that the state’s revenue will be an estimated $883 million lower this year and $1.8 billion lower than previously forecasted next fiscal year.

State Treasurer Rachel Eubanks reiterated that the state’s economy ‘continues to perform really well,’ and that the loss in revenue was as a result of intentional policy changes.

‘We’re projecting revenue growth in the coming years, even with the responsible tax relief, due to our strong economic position, thriving businesses and low unemployment,’ Eubanks told reporters after the new estimates were released.

Even with the slight dip, the state is still flush with cash. State Budget Director Chris Harkins said the state will go into the next fiscal year that begins in October with a surplus of an estimated $7.5 billion.

Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer proposed a budget earlier this year totaling $79 billion, which would be the state’s highest ever, if approved. Haskins cautioned that it would need to be ‘reduced slightly’ due to the new projections.

Last week, the Michigan House passed a $80 billion budget before the Senate approved its own $79 billion budget. The two chambers will have until July 1 — a self-imposed deadline — to reach an agreement on a final budget.

Democrats will need to garner Republican support for the budget to take effect by the end of the fiscal year in October, even with a two-seat majority in both chambers. Immediate effect requires a two-thirds vote of approval in the state Senate.

An income tax rate reduction triggered earlier this year by high revenues will cost the state an estimated $647 million in revenue the next two years.

Another $600 million in revenue loss annually will come from corporate economic development efforts, with $500 million being sent to the state’s Strategic Outreach and Attraction Reserve Fund.

The fund has been used to land major economic development project — including a $3.5 billion Ford Motor Co. plant announced this spring — by offering tax incentive packages.

The new tax policies are expected to continue affecting Michigan’s revenue in the years to come. Whitmer and the Legislature approved in March a significant increase of the state’s Earned Income Tax Credit from 6% to a 30% match of the federal rate, which will cost the state $1.15 billion the next two years.

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Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., said that if the U.S. can finance trillion-dollar wars, it can fund reparations. But Bush’s astronomical $14 trillion reparations proposal would cost nearly seven times that of the Afghanistan war.

The Missouri Democrat introduced her reparations proposal this week to compensate for what she believes are racist government policies that created a wealth gap between White and Black people. 

During a press conference on Wednesday, the ‘Squad’ member said the U.S. has ‘a moral and legal obligation to provide reparations for the enslavement of Africans’ to atone for the harm it caused. 

‘Black people in our country cannot wait any longer for our government to begin addressing… all of the harm it has caused since the founding, that it continues to perpetuate each and every day all across our communities, all across this country,’ Bush said during the press conference.

‘Let us speak this truth, uncomfortable as it may be: Our country was not founded on the principle that all people are created equal,’ she continued. ‘It was founded at the expense of the lives, freedom and well-being of Black people, African folks who they stole.’

When a Fox News Digital reporter asked where the federal money would come from for the massive proposal, Bush said they were still hashing out the details. She added that if the country can finance costly wars, it can generate money for reparations.

‘We’re still having those kinds of conversations,’ Bush said. ‘We’re working with this administration, we’re talking with other members of Congress… but I’ll say this, if we can continue to fund these endless wars, or we can continue to put trillions of dollars into forever wars… we’re talking about things that are happening now.’ 

Bush’s proposal would carry a price tag equivalent to almost seven times that of the Afghanistan war. The 20-year war is estimated to have cost the U.S. around $2.3 trillion, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project. 

Bush’s federal proposal follows a growing push for reparations in several cities, most notably in San Francisco. In 2021, a coalition of progressive city leaders banded together to form Mayors Organized for Reparations and Equity (MORE) to provide the federal government with a blueprint for implementing a national program, Fox News Digital previously reported. 

‘Our coalition stands on the belief that cities can — and should — act as laboratories for bold ideas that can be transformative for racial and economic justice on a larger scale, and demonstrate for the country how to pursue and improve initiatives that take a reparatory approach to confronting and dismantling structural and institutional racism,’ the group said of its mission.

MORE has included several heavy-hitting Democratic mayors who have put into motion or implemented reparations pilot programs in their cities, such as former Providence, Rhode Island, Mayor Jorge Elorza; St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones; Sacramento, California, Mayor Darrell Steinberg; and former Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti. 

The White House has refused to say whether President Biden supports reparations for slavery and instead said it is ‘going to leave it there for Congress to decide.’

Bush’s office did not immediately respond to a Fox News Digital request for comment.

Fox News Digital’s Elizabeth Elkind contributed to this report.