John Solomon (political commentator)

[13] From May 1987 to December 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.

[17] 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.

[18] 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.

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.

[citation needed] Solomon also served as journalist in residence at the Center for Public Integrity, a non-profit organization that specializes in investigative journalism, from March 2010 to June 2011.

[8] He was also named executive editor of the Center for Public Integrity in November 2010 and helped oversee the launch of iWatch News, but resigned a few months later to join Newsweek/The Daily Beast in May 2011.

[19][20][8] In 2012, Solomon and former Associated Press executives Jim Williams and Brad Kalbfeld created the Washington Guardian, an online investigative news portal.

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.

[9] On June 19, 2019, The Hill published an opinion piece written by Solomon alleging that the FBI and Robert Mueller disregarded warnings that evidence used against Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort may have been faked.

[31][better source needed] 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.

[39] During October 2019 hearings for the impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump, two government officials experienced in Ukraine matters — Alexander Vindman and George Kent — testified that Ukraine-related articles Solomon had written and that were featured in conservative media circles contained a "false narrative" and in some cases were "entirely made up in full cloth.

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.

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.

[48] 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 February 2020.

[50][51] 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".

[52] Paul McCleary, writing for the Columbia Journalism Review in 2007, wrote that Solomon had earned a reputation for hyping stories without solid foundation.

[7] 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.

"[59] Independent journalist Marcy Wheeler accused Solomon of manufacturing fake scandals which suggested wrongdoing by those conducting probes into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

[8] In January 2018, Solomon published a report for The Hill suggesting that Peter Strzok and Lisa Page had foreknowledge of a Wall Street Journal article and that they themselves had leaked to the newspaper.