John Solomon's Revelations

Yesterday's post on the new revelations about Sally Yates's role in stopping the FBI investigation into a pay-to-play scheme involving the Clinton Family Foundation and then the effort to get Michael Flynn out of the White House relied mostly on a story at John Solomon's Just the News. I couldn't help thinking this added quite a bit of context to many individual pieces in the whole Russiagate story -- it made me think it all got started as early as 2015 in an effort to secure the nomination for Hillary.

Sean Spicer interviewed Solomon yesterday evening on his own podcast (embedded above), separate from the Mark Halperin 2WAY show. Some of the context suggests it was done a day or two before the Just the News story was posted, but it does seem to give a wide-angle view of how Solomon is coming to see Russiagate, that is, that the pee dossier and the Flynn affair are just incidental pieces of a wider and longer-lived scheme. At 1:35, Solomon lays it out:

I do have a crystal ball about what we probably will be talking about in the next 48 hours. After all the leak stuff that I've done in the last few days, you kind of see two buckets of leaks, you've got Adam Schiff, we'll talk about that, and you've got James Comey and his sort of personal media consigliere that he puts on the taxpayer's dime to sort of burnish his image. One of the other things that I've always wanted to get to, and I think we've found the holy grail documents now, is everybody is focused on Hillary Clinton and the e-mail server, and that's an inmportant story, because it involved classified information being moved through an insecure channel.

But I've always believed that the bigger threat to Hillary Clinton was what the FBI was trying to do to look at whether her foundation was basically a back door for corruption, a Hunter Biden laundered through a c(3) family foundation. In the next 48 hours or so, I think we're going to get to see for the first time just how much political interference FBI agents faced in multiple jurisdictions when they got predicated leads, meaning evidence that warranted criminal investigation. . . concerning the Clinton Foundation. [This is the story that came out yesterday.] We're probably going to be able to name the names of people who ordered these investigations shut down [Yates and McCabe], even though the FBI manual, the US Attorney's manual, suggested those investigations should proceed until determinations were made about criminality.

I think this is the big Hillary scandal that has sort of skated below the radar, and I think it's going to be in the next few weeks a very parallel story to what happened with Hunter Biden. Hunter Biden, the FBI, the IRS, everybody knew he had a problem. and nobody could get the permission to go and do the case right until these whistleblowers came forward with us two years ago. I think similarly, you're going to see that there was a protection racket around Hillary Clinton, not just on the e-mail, we know what James Comey did with his magic FBI wand. . . . you're going to see who in government was providing that protection.

Solomon sees an overall pattern: a scandal threatens to emerge that could hurt Hillary badly, first the pay-to-play at the Clinton Foundation, and then the offsite e-mail server, but in both cases, she's able to enlist the Obama Justice Department and the FBI to shut those invesgations down, and not only that, but to start phony investigations of Trump and his people to create a distraction. Solomon says later in the interview,

. . . Last week, Harmeet Dhillon came on the show, she's the civil rights chief for the [Justice Department], and she said, based on what she's seen, and she's not gonna talk about specific cases, but there's a very good chance that what the Justice Derpartment's gonna look at, is that this process, this "clear Hillary and put a fake scandal on the Trump people", may have been a deprivation of civil rights and civil liberties under color of authority.

It seems like nobody likes John Solomon. I did a web search on "disgraced journalist John Solomon" and got hits from the left like:

Fox News host Sean Hannity has welcomed disgraced conservative journalist and serial misinformer John Solomon back for regular appearances on his prime-time show to rail against the FBI search for classified government documents at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence.

In 2019, Solomon appeared over 50 times on Hannity’s show, where he regularly pushed Ukraine-linked conspiracy theories meant to undermine the validity of the Trump-Russia investigation that dominated headlines during the first years of the Trump presidency and was at the center of his first impeachment trial. Solomon was later fired from his position as a Fox News contributor for his role in coordinating a “disinformation campaign” to protect Trump, and his appearances on the network fell off.

But Sundance at Conservative Treehouse accuses Solomon of workng hand-in-glove with Pam Bondi and Kash Patel to "leak" nothingburgers to create the appearance of active investigations. Just this past Wednesday:

Apparently, Kash Patel just discovered Daniel Richman, the guy who leaked information on behalf of James Comey; and along with that name from the past, someone in the Kash Patel office decided they wanted to highlight the 8-year-old FBI investigation about the FBI hunting for internal leakers.

Patel sends John Solomon the information on Daniel Richman. Solomon repackages the information and sells it as new bombshells. I’m not sure what these guys are doing, but Richman is a well known name from the past, when James Comey made the unsolicited announcement, a self-admission in 2017 about his use of Richman to leak to the New York Times.

The day before:

FBI Director Kash Patel sends John Solomon a declassified whistleblower report, showing how a prior House Intelligence Committee staffer blew the whistle on then HPSCI ranking member Adam Schiff, who was giving the staff instructions to leak fabricated intelligence reports on Trump-Russia to smear President Donald Trump in 2017 and 2018.

According to the release {SEE HERE}, the FBI eventually received and investigated the whistleblower claims; then in 2023, sent the information to the Merrick Garland/Lisa Monaco DOJ, who took no action because the claim was now beyond the statute of limitations.

. . . As Solomon now notes, … “The alleged leaks fall outside the statute of limitations for prosecution on most legal theories, but the revelations nevertheless come at a sensitive time for Schiff“.. At the time of the Whistleblower report, the information to the FBI and DOJ would have been evidence that could have prosecuted Adam Schiff. However, now the information is limited to just providing I-told-you-so’s.

As best I can make out, Solomon's problem is that he was reporting favorably on Trump when that wasn't cool. Now, at least for Sundance, his problem seems to be that Trump people trust him and give him stories they don't give to Sundance, which is confirmation that they're secretly working against Trump, or something like that.

My sense is that Trump people trust Solomon and are giving him important stories, although within traditionally circumscribed guidelines. They won't comment on ongoing investigations and won't leak, but they'll point him to public information they think is important. That's all I can gather from the Spicer interview. But I also have a sense that Sundance is miffed that people like Patel and Dhillon don't trust him, either.