Corporate media knives are out for investigative reporter John Solomon after his recent interview with former President Donald Trump went viral.
In multiple articles about the interview, news outlets like Business Insider, Politico, and the Week belittled the award-winning journalist, describing him as “discredited” “disowned,” and “far-right.”
Solomon has reported for the Associated Press, the Washington Post, the Washington Times, and the Hill, among others news outlets.
Throughout his interview with Solomon and reporter Amanda Head—which was posted Tuesday by Solomon’s Just the News on the Real America’s Voice network—Trump laid out his plan to reverse Biden’s destructive agenda.
The former president also called on Russian President Vladimir Putin to release information regarding alleged dealings between Eastern European oligarchs and Hunter Biden.
“Why did the mayor of Moscow’s wife give the Bidens, both of them, three and a half million dollars?” Trump asked.
President #DonaldTrump calls on Putin to release info on Hunter Biden’s dealings with Russian oligarchs: “Why did the mayor of Moscow’s wife give the Bidens, both of them, three and a half million dollars?”
Read more: https://t.co/y4Y0ofC5CX pic.twitter.com/gbWzyifuEH
— John Solomon (@jsolomonReports) March 29, 2022
In news articles about the remarks, The Week described Solomon as a “far-right journalist,” Politico reported that Trump spoke with “discredited far-right journalist John Solomon,” and Business Insider said that the reporter was “one of the architects of the Trump’s Ukraine disinfo” who “was disowned by The Hill and Fox News. New York Times reporter Adam Goldman retweeted the Politico’s tweet calling Solomon a “discredited far-right journalist.”
Politico also derided the 2020 Senate investigation into the Biden family’s corruption as “highly politicized.”
In making his claims about Hunter Biden, Trump cited the findings of a controversial, highly politicized investigation by Senate Republicans into the Bidens, which was published just weeks before the 2020 election and produced little new evidence of wrongdoing.
Trump has repeatedly promoted dubious claims of foreign business dealings by Hunter Biden, specifically alleging that he received millions of dollars from the wife of Moscow’s late mayor, Yury Luzhkov.
“She gave him $3.5 million so now I would think Putin would know the answer to that. I think he should release it,” Trump said in the interview, conducted at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. “I think we should know that answer.”
The Senate investigation found that Elena Baturina sent the $3.5 million in 2014 to a firm called Rosemont Seneca Thornton, and that the payment was identified as a “consultancy agreement.”
According to a CNN “factcheck,” a Biden spokesman said “Hunter Biden was a co-founder and CEO of the investment firm Rosemont Seneca Advisors,” but did not co-found Rosemont Seneca Thornton.
Rosemont Seneca Partners, which was founded in 2009 by Hunter Biden, Christopher Heinz, and Devon Archer, was reportedly named after the Rosemont Farm, the Heinz family’s estate near Pittsburgh.
“It’s not clear what connection exists between Rosemont Seneca Advisors and Rosemont Seneca Thornton,” CNN noted. However, according to the New York Post, Rosemont Seneca Thornton is also linked to Hunter Biden.
Business Insider accused Solomon of pushing “disinformation about the Bidens and Ukraine.”
“In the early years of Trump’s presidency Solomon produced a series of columns for The Hill alleging dubious business dealing by Hunter Biden in Ukraine, and corruption by his father (the allegations were never proven),” BI reported.
The columns were widely cited in conservative media, with his background at mainstream outlets like the AP apparently lending them credibility. Solomon was a frequent guest on Fox News host Sean Hannity’s show.
They formed part of the web of conspiracy theories and unsubstantiated claims that led to Trump’s first impeachment in 2019, after he threatened to withhold military aid from Ukraine’s newly elected president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, unless he helped in the bid to smear the Bidens.
Business Insider linked to its own article covering allegations made by fired ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch in her memoir, “Lessons From the Edge” to substantiate its claim that conservative media reporting at the time amounted to a “web of conspiracy theories and unsubstantiated claims.”
For years, one of Solomon’s sources, Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, investigated collusion between corrupt Ukraine officials and the Democrat party in 2016, as well as ties between the Bidens and the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma. Frustrated by the establishment’s lack of interest in the story, he repeatedly urged the media and Department of Justice to look into the alleged corruption.
Yovanovitch wrote in her book that team Trump “was focused on the announcement of an investigation rather than an actual investigation.”
According to Giuliani, however, Yovanovitch was not the innocent nonpartisan professional the corporate media pretended she was during the Democrats’ first impeachment trial of President Trump.
“There are at least five Ukrainian officials who are willing to testify against her, not anonymously, like their whistleblower, not hearsay, like their first two witnesses — this may be hard for Adam Schiff to take — but they would actually give real testimony. And what they would say basically is that she was very, very pro-Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election,” Giuliani told One America News in November of 2019.
“There are five witnesses who say that she instructed the prosecutor general of Ukraine to dismiss four cases,” he added. “Two of those cases involved Ukrainian collusion with Democrats to hurt Donald Trump. One of them involved a company owned by George Soros. There are five witnesses who are willing to testify to that. None of them were called. None of them were interviewed.”
Giuliani told Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk that “Saint” Yovanovitch “quashed” a corruption investigation into the disappearance of foreign aid because the Obama Administration was funneling the money to non-governmental organizations run by Soros.
Giuliani said that in 2017, the Ukrainian Accounting Authority did a study which revealed that $5.3 billion in foreign aid during the Obama/Biden years was not properly accounted for. So the agency started an investigation.
“All of a sudden, members of the U.S. Embassy, under the control of Marie Yovanovitch—I call her Saint Marie Yovanovitch—comes and tells them, ‘there’s no need to do that. We’re okay with the spending. There’s no need to,’” he said.
In another highly partisan and possible illegal move, Yovanovitch, while ambassador of Ukraine, allegedly ordered subordinates to monitor prominent conservative figures, journalists and persons with ties to President Donald Trump.
Solomon reported at the Hill in April of 2019 that Ukrainian law enforcement officials believed they had evidence of wrongdoing by American Democrats and their allies in Kiev, “ranging from 2016 election interference to obstructing criminal probes,” but they were thwarted by U.S. embassy in Kiev (led by Yovanovitch), which refused to provide Ukrainian prosecutors with visas so they could deliver their evidence to Washington.
Business Insider reported that the Hill in Feb. of 2020 conducted an internal review of Solomon’s 14 articles about Ukraine and the Bidens, and found that he had not disclosed that key sources for his articles included Giuliani, and Washington DC attorneys Victoria Toensing and Joseph diGenova.
“All three attorneys played key roles in propagating the Biden/Ukraine narrative, distributing conspiracy theories and disinformation about the Bidens seemingly meant to help Trump’s reelection campaign,” Business Insider opined.
BI said that Fox News “severed ties” with Solomon later that year after an internal Fox News memo claimed that he had promoted “disinformation” about Ukraine.
However, in February of 2020, Lee Stranahan, an investigative journalist who has reported on Ukraine extensively, wrote in a long Twitter thread that the 162-page document, entitled “Ukraine, Disinformation, & the Trump Administration,” was full of sloppy errors, omissions and outright lies. The report was created by Fox News senior political affairs specialist Bryan S. Murphy.
In a bombshell story in the Hill in June of 2019, Solomon reported that a key figure in the Mueller investigation — a Ukrainian businessman named Konstantin Kilimnik — was in fact informant for the U.S. government. However, the fact that Kilimnik worked for the feds was not mentioned in Mueller’s final report. Instead, the Ukrainian who worked for Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, was portrayed as a Russian agent.
But hundreds of pages of government documents — which special counsel Robert Mueller possessed since 2018 — describe Kilimnik as a “sensitive” intelligence source for the U.S. State Department who informed on Ukrainian and Russian matters.
In April of 2021, federal agents raided Giuliani’s home, and seized his personal property, including his electronic devices, which included all of his digital communications and records. The FBI had a search warrant for all communications between Giuliani and a number of correspondents, including Solomon.
Tucker Carlson noted at the time that it looked like “the Biden people haven’t forgotten” that John Solomon exposed Mueller’s “lie of omission” that “helped prop up the collusion hoax.”
Meanwhile, the probe into Hunter Biden’s business dealings, led by the US Attorney in Wilmington, Delaware, has reportedly “intensified” in recent weeks, “with discussions among Justice Department officials about the strength of the case, and whether more work is needed before seeking a decision on possible charges.”
Investigators have examined whether Hunter Biden and some of his associates violated money laundering, tax and foreign lobbying laws, as well as firearm and other regulations, multiple sources said.
To do so, law enforcement has gathered information from lobbyists connected to Hunter Biden, from his business partners, and from others who’ve observed his financial engagements, including a woman with whom he had a child.
Hunter Biden has not been charged with any crimes and has denied any wrongdoing. His father, President Joe Biden is not being investigated as part of the probe of his son’s business activities, according to sources who have been briefed.
Solomon’s 2019 reporting in the Hill (hardly the “early years of Trump’s presidency”) may never have been “proven” in court, and has been disputed by partisans like Yovanovitch, but it remains solid investigative journalism. And despite Business Insider’s claim to the contrary, Fox News has not “cut ties” with Solomon. The reporter to this day remains a frequent guest on the network.
via amgreatness