Biden Dirt File Has Private Email Between John Solomon and Rudy Allies

[Dennis Donovan]

https://www.thedailybeast.com/biden-ukraine-dirt-file-has-private-email-between-john-solomon-and-rudy-allies

The email was then included in part of a misinformation dossier that the State Department Inspector General delivered to Congress.

Erin Banco National Security Reporter
Maxwell Tani Media Reporter

Updated 10.03.19 3:19AM ET / Published 10.02.19 9:03PM ET

A controversial right-leaning reporter at the center of the Trump-Ukraine scandal emailed a copy of one of his stories—before it was published—to a top ally of Rudy Giuliani, as well as two pro-Trump investigators attempting to dig up negative information on the Biden family.

In March, The Hill's investigative reporter John Solomon published a story claiming that the U.S. government had pressured Ukrainian prosecutors to drop a probe of a group funded by the Obama administration and liberal billionaire George Soros. The story was published at 6 p.m., according to a timestamp on the paper’s website. Solomon himself didn’t share it on his Twitter account until 6:56 p.m. that night. The earliest cache of the story in the Internet Archive is from 7:42 p.m. Eastern time.

But hours before that, at 12:52 p.m. Eastern time, Solomon appears to have sent a version of the article to Ukrainian-American businessman Lev Parnas and the Trumpworld lawyers Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing. The email was titled “Outline of Soros reporting, including embedded documents” and included the headline and the text of his piece.

Two congressional sources confirmed to The Daily Beast that Solomon’s email was part of a roughly 50-page package of material that was turned over to lawmakers on Wednesday by the State Department’s Inspector General’s office. Reuters was the first to report the email’s inclusion in the packet.

That material, according to congressional sources, appeared to be a “misinformation” effort meant to smear the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and the Bidens. CNN reported on Wednesday that Giuliani had conceded that the information in the package originated, at least in part, with him.

</snip>

I just unfollowed The Hill on Twitter. Fuck them and Solomon.

[Cracklin Charlie]

1. Republicans are just not sending their best criminals these days.

Jacob Wohl? Giuliani? Where’d everybody go?

This is just crazy. I think my 18 month granddaughter could run a better operation.

[RAB910]

2. BWAHAHAHAHA "The Hill's investigative reporter"

sort of like a "FAUX News investigative reporter"

[Bernardo de La Paz]

3. And some here on DU champion theHill as a valid source for the Late Breaking News column/forum. . nt

[pecosbob]

4. Thank you...I get yelled at every time I post this.

[Dennis Donovan]

5. I'm done with them...

No more following - no more links - no more hits. Fuck 'em!

[Celerity]

6. Leaked Memo: Colleagues Unload on John Solomon, the Journo Who Kicked Off Trump's Ukraine Conspiracy

Solomon has left The Hill, btw


https://www.thedailybeast.com/leaked-memo-colleagues-unload-on-john-solomon-the-reporter-who-kicked-off-trumps-ukraine-conspiracy

The Trump-friendly scribe and his Biden-Ukraine conspiracies were cited multiple times in the whistleblower memo. Many of his co-workers are ashamed to be associated with him.

Beltway-centric newspaper The Hill employs a team of dozens of journalists from a variety of backgrounds. But only one has managed to alienate many of his colleagues, fuel the paranoia of Fox News viewers, and inadvertently play a key role in the whistleblower complaint and President Donald Trump’s potential impeachment. Over the past several years, John Solomon, a long-time journalist with bylines at the Washington Post, the Associated Press, and Newsweek/The Daily Beast, has pivoted to becoming the Trumpian right’s favorite “investigative reporter.”


And now, thanks to several mentions in the whistleblower’s complaint, his work has come under intense scrutiny following the revelation that a series of his stories about Ukraine, along with his Fox News appearances promoting them, may have led to the president asking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to team up with Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani to investigate the Biden family.

Over the past several months, and with the benefit of substantial airtime from Fox News primetime host Sean Hannity, Solomon has peddled a series of Ukraine-based conspiracy theories and allegations that have primarily taken aim at two of Trumpworld’s biggest targets: Biden and Hillary Clinton.

In the process, his questionable reporting, which often seems specifically tailored to stoke the flames of right-wing paranoia, has enraged many of his colleagues at The Hill who have for years seen his tactics and reporting as overtly ideological, convoluted, and often lacking in crucial context.

“He’s a lightning rod of anxiety for us,” one Hill insider told The Daily Beast.

snip



How a conservative columnist helped push a flawed Ukraine narrative

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/how-a-conservative-columnist-helped-push-a-flawed-ukraine-narrative/2019/09/26/1654026e-dee7-11e9-8dc8-498eabc129a0_story.html

Back in March, the Hill newspaper published a series of stories and interviews that seemed, at the time, to be mainly of interest to foreign-policy wonks. John Solomon, the paper’s executive vice president, interviewed Ukraine’s then-top prosecutor, Yuri Lutsenko, who alleged a startling conspiracy: that law enforcement officials within his country had leaked damaging information in 2016 against Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, to help Democrat Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

Lutsenko also floated suggestions that Marie Yovanovitch, who was then the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, was cooperating with the scheme to help Clinton and undermine Trump’s campaign. The ambassador, Lutsenko alleged, was “interfering in his ability to prosecute corruption cases” and had even given him a list of defendants that he would not be allowed to prosecute, Solomon wrote.

Solomon’s piece urged “a serious, thorough investigation” of Lutsenko’s claims. The story touched off a brushfire within the conservative media, in which Solomon is a prominent figure, but stayed largely out of mainstream view.

On Thursday, however, Solomon’s work gained new attention — and raised new questions about its sourcing, credibility and motivation. In a complaint filed by an anonymous whistleblower, Solomon’s stories were cited as part of a narrative about the alleged effort by Trump and his allies to pressure Ukraine’s government into digging up dirt on Trump’s Democratic rivals, including Clinton and Joe Biden, to enhance his prospects for reelection next year.

snip


The Rot on The Hill

John Solomon's role in laundering Trump's Ukraine scandal is just the latest black mark on the dodgy D.C. newspaper.

https://newrepublic.com/article/155192/john-solomon-the-hill-ukraine-trump-scandal

There are many things about life inside the Beltway (physical and metaphorical) that people in the rest of America might find strange. The subway system has ads from defense contractors boasting about their new warplane in between ads for a new salad at Panera; there’s often an important person’s motorcade blocking your route home; and you might end up eating dinner one table over from Stephen Miller and be forced, by all standards of moral decency, to call him a prick before you leave.

One of the strangest phenomena is that so many people seem to have full-time jobs in “advocacy,” which is a Beltway term for undisclosed lobbying, churning out total nonsense that is micro-targeted at an audience of the hundreds or dozens of other Beltway suits who control the levers of policy. Does any of this actually work, you might wonder? Is it a good use of their clients’ money, for these people to spend their entire, well-paid work day at their “public affairs” firms doing things like creating Twitter accounts for fake grassroots campaigns, or ghostwriting editorials for some other schmuck to attach their byline?

It is that last part that seems to fuel a significant portion of opinion pieces at The Hill, a newspaper and website that very important Beltway people mostly read for news from inside the grim machinery of our government, and which has drawn in a large audience beyond that crowd thanks to its laissez-faire approach to breaking news aggregation—the faster (and more useless) the better. These stories tell us important facts like, for example, that anonymous Democratic staffers and members of Congress are mad at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or Have Concerns about Medicare for All. But its opinion section is even more egregiously attuned to the interests and concerns of whoever happens to have the most money to spend. It is a dumping ground for whichever policymaker, think tank lanyard, or corporate CEO might want to publish some poorly-written—and self-serving—dreck about public policy that day.

It was also a regular platform for John Solomon, who until last week was the executive vice president of The Hill. Solomon also wrote regular columns for the paper, making him more productive than most executive vice presidents of anything. These columns, in the words of The Washington Post, “veered rightwards”; in more honest terms, they were right-wing fever dreams.

snip

[muriel_volestrangler]

7. He hasn't left The Hill - he's just marked as "opinion"

rather than "investigative journalist" (though apparently still introduced like that on Fox, because they, like him, aren't ashamed to mislead their marks). He styles himself on Twitter "John Solomon is an award winning investigative journalist and the Executive VP at The Hill. " I see other outlets claim he's no longer exec VP.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

8. And Solomon is only one of many the Republicons coordinate with, including tRump openly w Fox. . nt

[dawg day]

9. Wow. So he really was in the fix, Solomon?

Rudy has got to be the least competent crook since the Keystone Cops. This was his doing too, apparently, and he left figurative fingerprints all over it. Now maybe he brings down his most useful "journalist."