Who is John Solomon?

Top diplomats have repeatedly linked President Donald Trump’s posture toward Ukraine to John Solomon, the journalist whose reports gave false credence to a number of Ukraine-related conspiracies that have found a receptive audience in Trump and some of his closest allies.

Solomon, 52, had been working until recently as an opinion writer at The Hill and is now a Fox News contributor. His columns were cited three times in the whistleblower complaint that helped spur House Democrats to open their impeachment investigation into Trump.

He sounds like more of a trans journalist than a real one.

On Nov. 19, House Intelligence Committee ranking member Devin Nunes, R-Calif., opened the second week of public impeachment hearings by citing Solomon’s scoops and findings as fact.

“Solomon’s reporting on Burisma, Hunter Biden and Ukraine election meddling has become inconvenient for the Democratic narrative,” Nunes said in his statement, which came just one day after The Hill announced it would be reviewing, annotating and correcting Solomon’s columns.

What Solomon does is “reporting” while what the impeachment inquiry is doing is “narrative” – according to the strikingly untruthful Devin Nunes.

So, who is John Solomon? The veteran Washington, D.C., reporter has become a regular on Fox News and a go-to source of information for Trump. A series of springtime articles he published about Ukraine helped kickstart the events at the heart of the impeachment inquiry.

His columns alleged corruption by Biden and a former ambassador and accused Democrats of working with Ukraine to hurt Trump’s chances in 2016. They gained traction as Trump, his allies and various Fox News hosts talked about them on TV and social media.

Never mind whether it’s true or not, it’s being talked about.

Solomon won an award in 2002 for a series on what law enforcement knew ahead of the Sept. 11 attacks. But media critics also questioned his early work, saying he had a “history of bending the truth to his storyline” and “massaging facts to conjure phantom scandals.”

Solomon’s commentary for The Hill has generated the most buzz. In 2017, he played a major role in pushing the inaccurate Uranium Oneconspiracy, alleging that Hillary Clinton sold a share of America’s uranium to Russia in exchange for a massive donation to the Clinton Foundation.

The Hill started labeling Solomon’s work as opinion in 2018.

Then, in March and April 2019, Solomon published a series of columns alleging conspiracies involving Democrats and Ukraine.

One of his key sources, apparently, was former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer.

According to the New York Times, Giuliani, whose activities were central to the administration’s efforts to get an investigation launched into Trump’s political rivals, gave Solomon a cache of information on Biden, his son Hunter and special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe.

“I really turned my stuff over to John Solomon,” Giuliani told the New York Times.

I suspect it was more “stuff” than “information.”

Senior State Department official George Kent later testified that what he had described as the “campaign of slander” against former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch began with one of Solomon’s articles and ended with Yovanovitch’s removal.

And Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, director for European Affairs at the National Security Council, said he became concerned about Giuliani and the narratives he was pushing in part because of Solomon’s columns. State Department official Catherine Croft said the same.

…

Solomon’s opinion articles on Ukraine have advanced a number of unsupported allegations about Yovanovitch, the Bidens and supposed Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 election.

He has had an assist from Fox News host Sean Hannity, Giuliani and Trump, who tweeted about Solomon’s work four times and recently suggested he should win a Pulitzer Prize.

Solomon has appeared on Hannity’s primetime TV show at least 55 times since March 20, according to our search via Nexis. He has been mentioned many more times, as well.

On March 20, Solomon went on Hannity’s show to promote a column he had published that day based on an interview he conducted with Yuriy Lutsenko, then the top prosecutor in Ukraine.

The column quoted Lutsenko falsely claiming that Yovanovitch gave him a list of people he should not prosecute, a charge the State Department denied and Lutsenko has since retracted. The column also claimed Yovanovitch had privately bad-mouthed Trump, citing a letter from former Rep. Pete Sessions, a Texas Republican, to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Yovanovitch denied both allegations during her testimony.

And Trump called in to Fox News yesterday to repeat the same filthy lies about Yovanovitch on the air.

Other impeachment witnesses have criticized Solomon’s writing on Yovanovitch. Kent testified that Solomon’s article “was, if not entirely made up in full cloth, it was primarily non-truths and non-sequiturs.” He later said he had “every reason to believe it was not true.”

Vindman said all the “key elements were false,” noting that Solomon’s columns “smelled really rotten” before joking, “His grammar might have been right.”

Similar objections have been raised in testimony about two articles Solomon published about Biden in April, which were also referenced in the whistleblower’s complaint.

Etc etc etc. There’s no end to the slime.