John F. Solomon

John F. Solomon is an American investigative journalist, author, and political commentator. He is the founder, editor-in-chief, and CEO of Just the News, a digital news organization launched in 2020. Over a career spanning more than three decades, he has held reporting and editorial positions at Associated Press, The Hill,

Solomon has received several awards, including the 2008 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for his investigative journalism. However, he has also been accused of exaggerating minor scandals, creating false controversy, and promoting conspiracy theories.

Solomon has been described by some as playing an important role in promoting conspiracy theories about unproven allegations of wrongdoing in Ukraine by Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. Solomon's reporting on the Bidens influenced Trump's unsuccessful efforts to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into publicly launching an investigation into the elder Biden—an effort that ultimately led to Trump's first impeachment.

From 1987 until 2006, Solomon worked at the Associated Press, where he became the assistant bureau chief in Washington, helping to develop some of the organization's first digital products, such as its online elections offering.

In 2007, he served as The Washington Post's national investigative correspondent.

The Washington Times (2008–‍2009; 2013–‍2015)

Executive Editor In February 2008, Solomon became editor-in-chief of The Washington Times. Under Solomon, the Times changed some of its style guide to conform to more mainstream media usage. The Times announced that it would no longer use words like "illegal aliens" and "homosexual," and instead opt for "more neutral terminology" such as "illegal immigrants" and "gay," respectively. The paper also decided to stop using "Hillary" when referring to Senator Hillary Clinton, and to stop putting the word "marriage" in the expression "gay marriage" in quotes. He also oversaw the redesign of the paper's website and the launch of the paper's national weekly edition. A new television studio was built in the paper's Washington DC headquarters, and the paper also launched a syndicated three-hour morning drive radio news program.

Return After a three-and-a-half-year hiatus, most of which was spent at Circa News, Solomon returned to the Washington Times in July 2013 to oversee the newspaper's content, digital, and business strategies. He helped craft digital strategies for the purpose of expanding online traffic, created new products and partnerships, and led a reorganization of the company's advertising and sales team. He also helped launch a new subscription-only national edition targeted for tablets, cellphones, and other mobile devices, and helped push a redesign of the paper's website.

Solomon left the paper in December 2015 to serve as chief creative officer of the mobile news application Circa, which was relaunching at that time.

Washington Guardian In 2012, Solomon and former Associated Press executives Jim Williams and Brad Kalbfeld created the Washington Guardian, an online investigative news portal. It was acquired by The Washington Times when Solomon returned to the paper in July 2013. He left in July 2017.

The Hill (2017–‍2019) Upon leaving Circa, Solomon became executive vice president of digital video and an opinion columnist Until May 2018, he worked on news and investigative pieces for The Hill.

In October 2017, Solomon published an article in The Hill about the Uranium One controversy, where he insinuated that Russia had made payments to the Clinton Foundation at the time when the Obama administration approved the sale of Uranium One to Rosatom. Solomon's story also focused on the alleged failures of the Department of Justice to investigate and report on the controversy, suggesting a cover-up. Solomon pinned responsibility for the decision solely on Secretary Clinton. Subsequent to Solomon's reporting, the story "took off like wildfire in the right-wing media ecosystem," according to a 2018 study by scholars at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University.

Pro-Donald Trump opinion pieces Solomon published a story alleging that women who had accused Trump of sexual assault had sought payments from partisan donors and tabloids. His source was Nazar Kholodnytsky, a disgraced Ukrainian prosecutor, and Konstantin Kilimnik, who has been linked to Russian intelligence and was Manafort's business partner.

Trump–Ukraine scandal

In April 2019, The Hill published two opinion pieces by Solomon regarding allegations by Ukrainian officials that "American Democrats", and particularly former Vice President Joe Biden, were collaborating with "their allies in Kiev" in "wrongdoing...ranging from 2016 election interference to obstructing criminal probes." Solomon's stories attracted attention in conservative media. Solomon also promoted these allegations on Sean Hannity's Fox News show. On the same day that The Washington Post published its article, The Hill published another opinion piece by Solomon in which Solomon states that there are "(h)undreds of pages of never-released memos and documents...(that) conflict with Biden's narrative."

Solomon's stories had significant flaws. Solomon pushed allegations that Biden wanted to remove a Ukrainian prosecutor in order to prevent an investigation of Burisma, a Ukrainian company that his son, Hunter Biden, served on; however, Western governments and anti-corruption activist wanted the prosecutor removed because he was reluctant to pursue corruption investigations. WNYC characterized Solomon's Ukraine stories as laundering of foreign propaganda.

Prior to the publication of a story where Solomon alleged that the Obama administration had pressured the Ukrainian government to stop investigating a group funded by George Soros, Solomon sent the full text of his report to Ukrainian-American businessman Lev Parnas, and to pro-Trump lawyers and conspiracy theorists Joseph diGenova and Victoria Toensing as well. Solomon said he did so for fact-checking, but Parnas, DiGenova and Toensing were not mentioned in the text, nor did Solomon send individual items of the draft for vetting, but rather the draft of the entire article.

Solomon worked closely with Lev Parnas, an associate of Rudy Giuliani - Trump's personal attorney – who was indicted for funneling foreign money into American political campaigns, to promote stories that Democrats colluded with a foreign power in the 2016 election. (The U.S. intelligence community's assessment is that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to aid Trump, then a Republican presidential candidate). Parnas worked with Solomon on interviews and translation. Solomon defended his work with Parnas: "No one knew there was anything wrong with Lev Parnas at the time. Everybody who approaches me has an angle." According to ProPublica, Parnas helped set Solomon up with the Ukrainian prosecutor who accused the Bidens of wrong-doing (before walking back the claim).

Impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump Solomon was mentioned in a draft report by the House Intelligence Committee published December 3, 2019, documenting President Trump's alleged abuse of office for his personal and political gain by using congressionally approved military aid to induce Ukraine initiate investigations against Trump's domestic political rival. The report documented phone records showing Solomon was in frequent contact with Lev Parnas, an associate of Giuliani, exchanging "at least 10 calls" during the first week in April. Parnas was later convicted of various financial crimes, which included making illegal donations to politicians.

Advertising controversy Solomon was accused of breaking the traditional ethical "wall" that separated news stories from advertising at The Hill. In October 2017, Solomon negotiated a $160,000 deal with a conservative group called Job Creators Network to target ads in The Hill to business owners in Maine. He then had a quote from the group's director inserted into a news story about a Maine senator's key role in an upcoming vote on the Trump administration's tax bill. Solomon “pops by the advertising bullpen almost daily to discuss big deals he's about to close," Johanna Derlega, then The Hill’s publisher, wrote in an internal memo at the time, according to Pro Publica. "If a media reporter gets ahold of this story, it could destroy us." A February 2020 internal review by The Hill concluded that there were multiple flaws in Solomon's 14 columns about Ukraine and the Bidens, including omitting important details and failing to disclose that the sources used by Solomon were his own attorneys Victoria Toensing and Joseph diGenova—both close associates of Trump and his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani.

Fox News (2019–‍2020) In October 2019, it was reported that Solomon was joining Fox News as an opinion contributor. An internal Fox News research briefing book warned that "John Solomon played an indispensable role in the collection and domestic publication" of parts of the Trump-Ukraine "disinformation campaign," The Daily Beast reported in 2020.

Just The News (2020–‍present) In January 2020, Solomon launched Just The News, a news media outlet and website. He hosts a podcast, John Solomon Reports, on the website.

Access to Trump presidential records On June 19, 2022, Donald Trump sent a letter to the National Archives naming Solomon and Kash Patel as "representatives for access to Presidential records of my administration".

Reputational damage Paul McCleary, writing for the Columbia Journalism Review in 2007, wrote that Solomon had earned a reputation for hyping stories without solid foundation. In 2012, Mariah Blake, writing for the Columbia Journalism Review, wrote that Solomon "has a history of bending the truth to his storyline," and that he "was notorious for massaging facts to conjure phantom scandals."

The Washington Post wrote in September 2019 that Solomon's "recent work has been trailed by claims that it is biased and lacks rigor." Progressive news outlets ThinkProgress, Media Matters for America and Crooked Media have argued that Solomon's reporting has a conservative bias and that there are multiple instances of inaccuracies. According to The Intercept, Just Security and The Daily Beast, Solomon helps to advance right-wing and pro-Trump conspiracy theories. The New Republic described Solomon's columns for The Hill as "right-wing fever dreams." Independent journalist Marcy Wheeler accused Solomon of manufacturing fake scandals which suggested wrongdoing by those conducting probes into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Reporters who worked under Solomon as an editor have said that he encouraged them to bend the truth to fit a pre-existing narrative. According to the Huffington Post, Solomon's reporting omitted that the Wall Street Journal article Strzok and Page were discussing was critical of Hillary Clinton and the FBI, Strzok and Page expressed dismay at the fallout from the article, and Strzok and Page criticized unauthorized leaks from the FBI. According to the Huffington Post, "Solomon told HuffPost he was not authorized to speak and does not comment on his reporting. He may simply have been unaware of these three facts when he published his story. But they provide crucial context to an incomplete narrative that has been bouncing around the right-wing echo chamber all week." in 2002, the Associated Press's Managing Editors Enterprise Reporting Award for What The FBI Knew Before September 11, 2001, and the Gramling Journalism Achievement Award for his coverage of the war on terrorism; in 1992, the White House Correspondents' Association's Raymond Clapper Memorial Award (Second Place) for an investigative series on Ross Perot.