The byline read John Solomon, the same name printed atop four decades of journalistic work.

But now Solomon’s byline led an August White House press release, alleging a broad conspiracy by Democrats and American spies to falsely accuse President Donald Trump of colluding with Russia to hijack the presidency.  

In it, Solomon reported some news: that federal investigators in 2017 opened a short-lived intelligence probe into the sitting president over concerns that he may have been co-opted by a foreign enemy. But Solomon flipped the news on its head, spinning the probe as evidence of a wider “deep state” conspiracy against Trump and his allies.

An editor’s note at the bottom of the release revealed that Solomon had taken a leave of absence from his editor-in-chief role at his news outlet, Just the News, “while working as the chairman of the White House Government Transparency Task Force.”

A year ago, Solomon would have been better known for his role in shaping the conservative media landscape over decades of journalistic work in Washington. But this midterm season, his name has been popping up on government websites and news articles not written by John Solomon, describing him as a presidential “insider,” a White House “adviser” and even “Trump’s own election fraud guy.”

Over a few short years, Solomon transitioned from a scoop-hungry Washington editorial director giving favorable coverage to Trump’s election integrity narratives to a government operative, hand-picked by the president to write the narratives himself. He announced in June that he had joined the Trump administration as a special government employee, leading a task force that would “help the government identify some documents, some secrets, some things you should know about when it comes to weaponization, election integrity, and other things.”

His first assignment was to release a trove of declassified government documents that Trump had touted as proof that Democrat-led intelligence agencies were out to get him, and that foreign governments had “rigged and stolen” elections for his opponents. Solomon’s task force released the documents (with heavy redactions), but they undercut the basis of Trump’s claims; foreign powers had indeed attempted to influence elections, largely with social media campaigns aimed at candidates across the aisle, including both Trump and former President Joe Biden in 2020. But by Solomon’s own admission to MS NOW in July, “the intelligence community has zero evidence that someone, that a foreign power flipped a vote in 2020, ’22 or ’24.”

His press release in August, billed as a White House “news story” covering the Russian collusion probe against Trump, got little coverage from mainstream media, and Solomon’s rollout of documents got some poor marks from outlets that bit — The New York Times reported that there was “little new of substance in the documents,” and though it called the FBI’s case against Trump “remarkable,” it cast Solomon’s work as part of a wider Trump administration effort to “rewrite the history of the Russia investigation.”

But Solomon believes he’ll have the last laugh in the end, and that the industry he once championed will be proven wrong.

“I was right about Joe Biden and Ukraine and Burisma on every aspect. The Washington Post, MS NOW, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal were wrong,” Solomon said in an interview with MS NOW. “If someone would take a look at the facts, I’ll put my stories up against any other news media organizations.”

For many among Washington’s tightknit corps of professional journalists, Solomon’s leap to the White House has been a vexing — if not surprising — storyline. It is an unusually sharp arc for anyone in Trump’s wide orbit, let alone a longtime investigative reporter, and explains as much about how the president operates as it does about how journalism has changed since Trump was first elected in 2016.

With his appointment, Solomon was given an incredible amount of power to rewrite — and put a positive spin on — the Trump era, using a narrative-changing skillset he built over decades of sidling up to the most powerful people in Washington. He has since emerged as a hero among Trump allies, said Michael Caputo, a longtime Trump adviser who was investigated as part of the Trump-Russia probes almost a decade ago.

“Maybe it is a leap of faith from a typical journalism career,” Caputo said in an interview with MS NOW. “But name any other human being who would have done this for us.”

Interviews with more than two dozen of Solomon’s former colleagues, subordinates and an array of political operatives — most of whom spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal from their newsrooms, political parties and the federal government — paint a picture of a deeply talented and forceful reporter who fell into partisan spinmeister, and now pilots the president’s latest election disinformation campaign.

The AP Wunderkind

John Solomon was born in 1967 to a family of Connecticut law enforcement. The Times dubbed his father the “Super Sleuth” as police chief of Easton in a glowing profile detailing his dogged investigative work and impeccable accuracy. Solomon’s brother rose through the ranks at the Greenwich Police Department to work high-level financial crimes with federal investigators before retiring from a decorated career in 2020.

“Facts counted, and there was good and bad. You try to do the best based on the facts,” Solomon said in an interview for this story of the lessons he learned from his father, who died in 2024. “He was an outstanding man.”

In the ‘80s, Solomon took that gumshoe determination into journalism, first writing as a sports stringer for United Press International before graduating cum laude at Marquette University in Wisconsin. In 1987 he landed a job with The Associated Press, where he says he got his first big break as the pool reporter covering one of the Jeffrey Dahmer murders.

Within two years, he was promoted to news editor, the youngest in the wire’s history by his telling.

Few rose higher or faster in the famously strict and bureaucratic world of the AP. By 1991, at just 24 years old, he was sent to the Washington bureau, the wire’s crown jewel.

“The AP was very good to me,” Solomon told MS NOW.

He was a scoop machine, working with a surprising amount of freedom as the bureau’s lead investigative reporter, according to former colleagues. In 1992, Solomon said he secured special access from Richard Nixon to his presidential archives for a scoop that helped sink Ross Perot’s insurgent White House bid. Soon after, he was leading coverage of the Clinton White House scandals, positioning himself within earshot of then-President Bill Clinton’s inner circle.

He published a string of scoops from inside the White House, which shaped entire news cycles. His primary source for those stories was Clinton’s own special counsel, Lanny Davis, who was appointed to defend and deflect for the president. Davis said as much in his 1999 memoir, “Truth to Tell,” in which he celebrated Solomon’s workhorse dedication, writing an entire chapter on their relationship.

“I admired John Solomon when he was a strictly fact-based reporter who insisted on documents,” Davis told MS NOW. “He never would believe me unless I proved what I said with documents.”

By the end of Clinton’s presidency, Solomon was king of the White House scoop.

***

Through the start of the George W. Bush administration, Solomon continued breaking stories, this time on critical intelligence failures, including those that preceded the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The Bush Justice Department took notice, twice attempting to covertly discover Solomon’s sources and methods. In 2001, freshly minted FBI Director Robert Mueller approved a subpoena for Solomon’s home phone records. And in 2002, the feds intercepted a document mailed to Solomon detailing weaknesses in the case against one of the alleged masterminds of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Both efforts resulted in widespread criticism of the administration’s attacks on the free press, from then-AP President Louis Boccardi to top Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley. They also elevated Solomon’s standing as a dogged investigator who outed the failings of power without fear or favor.

After almost two decades at the AP, Solomon left for a prestigious role at the Post.

As part of the Post’s investigations team, Solomon brought in a wealth of opposition research from largely conservative sources.

“He was almost more scandal-happy than ideologically driven,” one former Post colleague said.

In 2008, he jumped outlets again, this time to lead a right-wing paper founded and bankrolled by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, leader of the Unification Church — otherwise known as the “Moonies” cult — and infamous for news coverage that was well-known at the time for partisan and often sloppy news coverage.

The would-be tycoon

“That was always my goal, to keep doing good journalism,” Solomon recalled of his time at the helm of The Washington Times.

In 2008, The Washington Times was still largely the only game in the nation’s capital for conservative news media. But the game was changing fast, with new arrivals like Steve Bannon and Andrew Breitbart’s digital outlet, Breitbart, beginning to capture audiences from legacy outlets.

Solomon’s jump to The Washington Times puzzled his former colleagues, but Solomon promised to turn it from a rag into a multimedia powerhouse at a time when the old media gatekeepers were still trying to figure out the internet.

He added a column from Breitbart. He deputized a Washington Times staffer to funnel scoops to Matt Drudge, whose online aggregator almost single-handedly made stories go viral. He poached big-name veterans from the Post, USA Today and other mainstream outlets to boost the paper’s credibility.

“He was doing all innovative things at The Washington Times, he was doing podcasting before others were doing it, he even had a video team before video was dominant,” said Christopher Ruddy, CEO of Newsmax Media, who rose to power contemporaneously with Solomon.

He was also my boss.

As a cub reporter on The Washington Times’ metro desk, I looked up to Solomon as someone who could help curb some of the blatant editorial bias that ran alongside — and often overshadowed — the legitimate reporting coming from our news staff. He wrote clear ethics and professional policies, eliminated biased language in the newsroom stylebook and built an editorial wall that distinguished the paper’s opinion pages from its news pages. His journalistic guidance elevated the Times on the radar of mainstream outlets, most of which previously ignored news coverage published by “The Moonie paper.”

But Solomon struggled to elevate The Washington Times into Washington’s elite media class despite his internal reforms and a steady stream of attention-grabbing scoops. And after two years at the top, Solomon’s strategies weren’t making enough money for the outlet. His first foray with The Washington Times came to an end amid an intrafamily squabble among the adult children of the paper’s founder and bankroller, Moon, which left Solomon in the lurch.

In November 2009, Solomon announced his resignation. A month later, The Washington Times laid off more than half the newsroom, including this reporter.

Solomon didn’t have trouble finding work, but his journalistic career appeared to be waning. He spent the next few years jumping between media ventures, including: a failed attempt to revitalize the now-dead Center for Public Integrity, a rocky stint at The Daily Beast, the fizzled launch of an investigative news site called The Washington Guardian and a brief return to The Washington Times just three years later.

Back at The Washington Times, Solomon and Herring Broadcasting announced the launch of a new network in March 2013: One America News, an unabashedly biased right-wing news network that would later evolve into a cheerleader and mouthpiece for the Trump administration.

Several longtime Democratic operatives familiar with Solomon’s career told MS NOW they saw a marked shift in Solomon’s coverage in this era; his once straight-laced political reporting was leaning more partisan in his second tour at The Washington Times.

Solomon’s new voice joined a growing online conservative media behemoth, which was positioning itself as a counterweight to then-President Barack Obama and liberal values.

At the same time, in 2015, Trump, the ascendant Republican presidential candidate, was capturing power and influence among the political and media elite. And with Trump’s shocking rise, Solomon rose, too.

The operator

“I think John is the reason for the first impeachment,” said a veteran Republican congressional staffer familiar with Solomon’s work leading up to Trump’s first term. That work included years of reporting on Russia and Ukraine by the time Trump had his “perfect” phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

As Trump collected scandals during his first years in office on the way to his impeachment over the Zelenskyy call in 2019, Solomon’s reporting became more focused on the president’s opponents.

The change started in July 2017, when Jimmy Finkelstein, publisher of The Hill, hired Solomon as vice president of digital television. Solomon helped build Hill.TV, at the time an unproven concept for a digital outlet, but which would go on to launch the careers of political commentators like Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti.

At the time, Solomon was also writing articles for The Hill’s news division. He resurfaced aging Democrat scandals, including some new reporting on the sale of Uranium One, a Canadian mining company purchased by Russian interests, which led to federal and congressional inquiries over revelations that interested parties had funneled millions to Clinton’s charitable organizations, and that Hillary Clinton’s role in the State Department gave her a voice in the deal’s approval. The sale, Solomon wrote, “was being reviewed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s State Department and eight other federal agencies. … Bill Clinton has said the monies he received had no bearing on his wife’s policymaking decisions.”

Right-wing media figures, including Sean Hannity and Alex Jones, latched onto the story — any and all coverage of the Clinton family’s scandals was red meat for the right-wing media machine.

“You had this report coming from John Solomon at The Hill, who’s been doing great work, especially when it comes to the Uranium One scandal and the, well, what was really a lack of a fair investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails,” said Owen Shroyer, former co-host of Alex Jones’ podcast, on an episode following Solomon’s piece.

As federal and congressional investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 election heated up, Solomon focused his coverage on nebulous claims from Republican officials about the Obama administration seeking intelligence on Trump’s transition team. His work was regularly cited by right-wing commentators, lending fuel to the deep state conspiracy theories pushed by Trump and his allies over the years.

At some point during his first year at The Hill, Solomon built a direct line to the president, and on occasion texted his stories to Trump directly, according to two people familiar with his outreach. But it was Solomon’s regular appearances on Trump’s favorite news shows that captured the attention of the Trump administration and the reactionary wing of the GOP.

According to a person familiar with Solomon’s time at The Hill, staffers were concerned about the apparent slant of Solomon’s coverage, repeatedly meeting with then-Editor-in-Chief Bob Cusack to demand clarity on his role — was he a news reporter or an opinion columnist? In 2018, Hill leadership started labeling Solomon’s work as coming from an “opinion contributor.”

Around the same time, Solomon established a working relationship with members of Trump’s inner circle.

In 2019, Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, and aides to California Republican Rep. Devin Nunes reportedly organized an informal team to dig up dirt on the Biden family’s work in Ukraine, according to Congressional testimony gathered in the official impeachment report. The team included a pair of Ukrainian businessmen, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, and Solomon, who reportedly met regularly and worked closely together for months, according to a comprehensive timeline of the events compiled from news coverage and congressional testimony by Just Security.

Solomon downplayed his work with the Giuliani team in a 2019 CNN interview cited by congressional investigators, saying his meetings with them happened “organically” at Trump International Hotel in Washington, and that he was working as a journalist gathering reporting.

In March that year, The Hill began publishing a series of columns by Solomon based on interviews with Ukraine general prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko and others, alleging a grand conspiracy between Democratic leadership and Ukrainian officials to meddle in the 2016 election in support of Hillary Clinton.

The series presented several different claims of corruption — many of which were later disputed by U.S. officials or called into question by other reporting — as part of a wider, Watergate-level scandal, involving the likes of DNC contractors, a career U.S. diplomat, Joe Biden and his son Hunter, and Hillary Clinton. “As Russia collusion fades, Ukrainian plot to help Clinton emerges,” reads one of Solomon’s headlines.

There was no smoking-gun evidence of a Ukrainian election meddling conspiracy in the series, the product of the meetings Solomon and Parnas attended with Giuliani’s team, according to a ProPublica report published in October 2019 titled “How a Veteran Reporter Worked with Giuliani’s Associates to Launch the Ukraine Conspiracy.”

Instead, the allegations in the series were roundly rebuked. Former Vice President Biden and his son roundly denied any wrongdoing and Trump’s own State Department officials deemed some claims to be “outright fabrication.” Lutsenko, Solomon’s key source for the claims of Biden family corruption, later recanted a claim published by Solomon that the Ukrainian prosecutor had been given a list of people to avoid prosecuting. Solomon’s editors at The Hill later added notes to the top of each story in the series, acknowledging the disputes and noting where Solomon may have used unreliable narrators as sources — including Parnas, who the outlet noted was facing a federal indictment over alleged campaign finance violations.

But questions about Solomon’s reporting didn’t stop the GOP from latching onto the storyline. Solomon appeared regularly on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program to hype the stories, and the accusations found a receptive audience with one of Hannity’s most loyal viewers: Donald Trump.

On a July 2019 phone call with Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump pressed the Ukrainian president over Biden, the DNC, and allegations of Ukrainian attempts to swing the election to Hillary Clinton. And even though Trump never formally deputized Giuliani as a diplomat or even special government employee – like he did for operations in his second term from Elon Musk to Solomon – Trump directed Zelensky to speak with Giuliani regarding his Ukraine findings, according to the call transcript.

That phone call, and Trump’s monthslong withholding of millions of dollars in military aid for Ukraine to defend against Russia, fatefully paved the way for Trump’s first impeachment.

Solomon defended his work on Twitter, posting at the time, “I stand by my stories 100 percent, all of which are completely accurate and transparent.”

“The only time people turned on me was during Hunter Biden,” said Solomon of his former news colleagues and longtime supporters. “Before Hunter Biden, everybody loved me, and then the profession decided to be on the other side of the Hunter Biden story.”

As impeachment proceedings raged on, Solomon signed a contract with Fox News as an on-air and digital opinion contributor and left The Hill to start his own media company, Just the News. The Hill was left with a national backlash over Solomon’s work. Cusack and a team of 12 internal investigators spent three months reviewing, fact-checking and re-reporting Solomon’s stories.

In an extensive audit published in February 2020, the review team affixed clarifications to several of Solomon’s stories — saying they lacked important context but also declining to take them down or directly recant his reporting.

By then, Solomon had left mainstream media.

The special government employee

In his special government employee role at the White House — which Solomon told MS NOW he is not being paid for — Solomon and then-intelligence Chief Bill Pulte helped craft Trump’s July speech expanding on long-running and unproven accusations of rampant election fraud.

Some have rung the alarm over Solomon’s role and the potential impacts of his work in the White House, saying his efforts could fuel a new Trump effort to derail the election processes in 2026 and 2028.

“I think [Trump’s speech] is intended to add the predicate that he needs to declare an emergency at or about the time of the elections,” former Trump White House lawyer Ty Cobb told PBS NewsHour in July. “You’re going to see people of the type of Bill Pulte and John Solomon, who have been conspiracy theorists from the start, who are willing to do whatever Trump asks supporting these claims.”

On July 17, 2026, Trump delivered a primetime address casting the 2026 elections as already co-opted, repeating debunked claims of Chinese interference in 2020 and debunked claims alleging hundreds of thousands undocumented immigrants voted.

The speech and the initial effort by Solomon and the election task force flopped for lack of evidence and impact, said one Solomon and Trump ally who spoke on the condition of anonymity to deliver a candid assessment at odds with the official White House messaging. The Solomon and Trump ally said he was hopeful that Solomon would eventually unearth the evidence proving that the CIA flipped the vote to Biden in 2020.

After Trump’s primetime speech, Solomon stood on the White House driveway with a binder of the most recent batch of declassified intelligence and answered questions from reporters.

“The Intelligence Committee has zero evidence that someone, that a foreign power, flipped the vote in 2020, ’22 or ’24,” Solomon told MS NOW’s Vaughn Hillyard. 

As a press aide hurried Solomon away, Hillyard asked about claims regarding the validity of the 2020 elections. Solomon replied, “I’m still researching.”

The post How a White House reporter became Trump’s election fraud spinmeister appeared first on MS NOW.

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