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John Solomon’s Propaganda Technique: Keeping the “Who” “What” “When” Secret to Fool the Rubes
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I want to unpack the latest propaganda campaign John Solomon rolled out (er, latest before his new hit job on Eric Swalwell, which had been packaged up in March before Swalwell dropped his gubernatorial race) — serving in his dual role of unpaid Special Government Employee permitted to troll through highly classified intelligence records and demand their release, and his long-term role of Trump’s favorite propagandist, funded by unknown sources. This latest installment turns his propaganda campaign back on himself, casting himself as a hero in his own disinformation.Before I unpack it, let me explain the challenge: Solomon tells his rubes none of the key details they would need to know to test the story or assess his credibility (nor have propagandists like Catherine Herridge or Paul Sperry, who have magnified it).
Solomon’s latest propaganda dump is based off: a spreadsheet the date and source of which he refuses to share. An undated presentation Tulsi Gabbard’s team did last year but did not release — David Warrington approved its release on August 4 (the day Jay Clayton would be sworn in), meaning Bill Pulte released in the period he was burning the IC down. And the only validation of any of these claims is in a letter Solomon claims Kash Patel wrote on a scrap of paper, not FBI stationary, that bears no signature nor date. Of the five Ws that journalists aspire to explain, Who, What, Where, When, and Why, Solomon doesn’t bother with at least three of them. Neither do his rubes, or the President, care about all that.
This thing is entirely devoid of any specific anchor in space or time.
Solomon succeeds in building stories off fumes because the far right has trained its adherents to create mobs based off the mere whiff of allegation, not because there’s any there there.
Here’s what Solomon claims he has shown based off that obscured spreadsheet cited but not released by Tulsi and backed by a letter the FBI Director may have written, but if he did, without any trappings of official capacity.
The FBI and U.S. spy agencies received derogatory evidence about Joe Biden from 14 different informants but embarked on a secret operation to tamp down a Ukrainian corruption scandal engulfing his family during the 2020 election by formally designating Attorney General Bill Barr, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, key members of Congress and journalists as Russian disinformation “conduits,” according to explosive intelligence community documents declassified by the White House.
None of this is backed by the three documents Solomon released.
Start with Solomon’s claim the FBI and spooks received derogatory evidence about Biden from 14 informants. Solomon ignores who those informants were or whether they were credible (I guess we can add “Why” to the list of five Ws Solomon has dispensed with). His own write-up refers to the guy who pled guilty to making shit up and hanging around with senior Russian spies, and the spreadsheet refers to one of the guys who Trump’s own administration labeled a Russian asset.
Instead of describing these informants’ lack of credibility, Solomon jumps immediately to the part where he claims — based on a single spreadsheet, all the most important details of which he has hidden!! — proves a “secret operation to tamp down a Ukrainian corruption scandal,” a scandal that Solomon treats as if it were true.
Remember when The Hill had to caveat Solomon’s bullshit claims about such a scandal in February 2020? Remember what those caveats were? That John Solomon “failed to identify important details about key Ukrainian sources” and that his hybrid role at the outlet created an illusion of credibility.
Solomon is attempting to resuscitate the old Ukraine tale that fell apart in 2020, using the very same discredited techniques he uses here.
Solomon gets that number — 14 informants — from “an FBI letter made public Wednesday,” which is the unsigned undated letter he attributes to Kash. That unsigned undated letter seems to talk about something radically different than Solomon is talking about. Kash describes those 14 to be a subset of 53 informants all of “whose identities were potentially known to foreign intelligence and under hostile control.”
As you know, Round River identified at least 53 Confidential Human Sources (CHS) whose identities were potentially known to foreign intelligence and under hostile control. At least 14 of these CHSs reported derogatory information on Joe Biden. At my direction, this FBI will take the unprecedented step of providing you with the source reporting from all 53 sources so you can finally see the facts.
That is, Kash is not claiming these were worthwhile informants. He’s saying the informants and their role providing information to the US government were at least potentially known to foreign spies who could, as I suspect happened with Christopher Steele, feed the informants bullshit. But Kash also describes that this list of 53 informants also may include people fully controlled by America’s enemies.
John Solomon calls them informants and suggests they are credible. Kash says at least some of them are working for and controlled by America’s adversaries.
And Solomon — who has been given privileged access to some of America’s most sensitive secrets — says discounting information from them was a bad thing. A scandal.
Now look at the means by which, Solomon claims, the Deep State tamped down on the Ukraine conspiracy theory that fell apart the first time Solomon was, literally, peddling it. The Deep State “tamped down” on this information by designating a bunch of people, including Bill Barr, conduits and discussing whether to tell them they were talking to known spies or shitty informants.
Seven paragraphs after introducing his inflammatory lead, Solomon explains that the spreadsheet whence he gets this claim was a list of people “identified as potential candidates for defensive briefings.”
Remember how, in 2019, the far right was outraged that Trump did not get a defensive briefing that his incoming National Security Advisor was being recruited by at least Turkey and probably also Russia? And then a centerpiece to the Durham Report was a claim — which is actually debunked if you read the report closely — that Hillary was being briefed on potential infiltration by foreign spies but Trump was not? But at the same time, in 2020, Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson were furious that their attempts to implicate Hunter Biden in precisely the Ukraine scandal that fell apart in Solomon’s hands were thwarted when DOJ told them one of their key sources was a Russian spy? By the way: The new Swalwell package doesn’t show him getting a defensive briefing that he had fucked someone the FBI suspected was a Chinese spy.
The far right has been all over the map about how they feel about defensive briefings. In this case, Solomon does some work to obscure how that impacts the meaning of his spreadsheet. Solomon never explains the What of this spreadsheet. For example, he never explains what “conduit” and “target” mean, which is a bit nutty since he himself is named as a conduit and the description of some of these people as being targeted in a “Soros related conspiracy theory” suggests target does not mean they did anything wrong, but instead were lied about by people of the sort Solomon likes to platform. But even before you get there, Solomon refuses to tell us the date of this spreadsheet, which is rather telling, because at one point he claims it dates to the 2020 election, in another he suggests it ties to the side channel Bill Barr set up to ingest disinformation from Rudy Giuliani (which Solomon misleadingly describes as an effort to mainstream the criminally false claims of Alexander Smirnov) in January 2020, in still another he (or rather, Tulsi) describes it occurring in December 2019. I don’t know when this spreadsheet was created. I find it exceedingly interesting, though, that there was a date on which Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who were arrested in October 2019, were considered “conduits,” with no FBI equities, but Rudy Giuliani (and Pete Sessions) were already deemed FBI equities (in all the other known cases listed as FBI equities, like Hunter Biden, those were people under criminal investigation), while Solomon himself was only listed as a conduit for his role in an OANN film, and not for his role in laundering bullshit stories that the Hill would later need to caveat heavily.
The known investigation into Rudy arose out of a criminal investigation into Lev and Igor, one that survived long after Bill Barr intervened to make Rudy’s exposure go away. I could struggle to find explanations for what point in time these descriptions would have been applied, but most of them point to more intervention from Bill Barr than we knew. Or, cherrypicking other Ukraine counterintelligence inquiries by John Solomon to hide the ones that were far more damning to him.
Whatever the explanation, that makes this treatment of Paul Manafort all the more interesting.
Solomon’s attempts to obscure the date of this spreadsheet is especially interesting given that he makes it clear a key part of it focuses on Andriy Telizhenko in the line of the spreadsheet just above his own entry — thanks for explaining that the FBI really did have reason to keep investigating Michael Caputo, John! — and a time that apparently preceded when he was installed at DHS to fuck up Trump’s COVID response!
As I have noted, Bill Barr likely met, on or before September 26, 2019, with one or several of the people sanctioned on the same day as Telizhenko, which would provide an explanation for his inclusion on this list that accords better with the timeline than Solomon’s tale than his attempt to launder information Rudy picked up, including from other known Russian spies.
Again, having espoused about 100 different views towards how defensive briefings work, here Solomon says that merely telling — say — the Attorney General that the Ukrainians peddling dirt to him are likely recruited Russian spies is instead an attempt to “tamp down” real data showing corruption on the part of the Bidens.
Solomon ascribes credibility to the informants, some of whom Kash says may be foreign spies, by pointing to this presentation done under Tulsi, which (among other things) reveals that this entire effort to review Round River is doing what Solomon accuses the FBI of doing. That presentation appears focused exclusively on Ukraine sources, and not at all on the 39 other suspect informants Kash mentioned.
Solomon gins up outrage by claiming that the Feebs who reviewed this material labeled each CHS file with a notation stating these allegations were false.
Remarkably, the DNI report alleges, the Round River team amended each of three informant files to portray their long-term reporting as false.
“The team of analysts had administrative accesses to all reporting and drafted intelligence products that were later added to each CHS file to show the reporting was deemed Russian disinformation,” the DNI memo stated. “The FITF-R team also provided defensive briefings to any Congressional member who obtained reporting related to any aspect of the Ukraine narrative.”
See how that “portray their long-term reporting as false” not only is not in quotes but is not remotely reflected in what Solomon quotes right after it? I see nothing in the presentation that substantiates that claim and much that debunks it. Start with the fact that none of the three informants described were closed in 2019 or 2020, when this supposed nefarious activity was going on. The informants were closed in December 2023 (when prosecutors was discovering that Alexander Smirmov made shit up), April 2022, and April 2025.
April 2025?!?!? You mean one of the informants Solomon is fluffing was deemed not to be credible by Trump’s own Deep State?!?!
What Tulsi’s report does say is, “The Round River team did not corroborate any of the allegations of the ‘Ukraine Narrative’,” which is different than saying that it’s all false. It’s saying that the spooks made an effort to corroborate it but could not … the same way they couldn’t corroborate the Steele dossier.
So in spite of the fact that Solomon has been given privileged access to highly classified files, he has nothing new.
His claim that any of this is credible retreats back to his old debunked propaganda.
Hunter Biden would eventually be convicted of tax and gun crimes before his father pardoned him, and legacy media would eventually pivot and be forced to acknowledge the corruption concerns from 2020 were real as Congress produced evidence of Joe Biden’s complicity with his son and business partners and the first family’s collection of millions of dollars from foreign interests.
An impeachment probe by the House Oversight Committee ultimately concluded in August 2024 that Joe Biden engaged in impeachable conduct by helping to enrich his family with millions of dollars in business schemes that traded on his name and then defrauded voters by lying to cover up the scandal. The committee specifically cited meetings between Biden and his son’s Ukrainian business partners, arguing the president “actively participated” in an influence-peddling conspiracy. [Second link replaced]
And even there, Solomon has to engage in deceit to make the claim. James Comer did indeed file a report making allegations of corruption (much of it focused on China, contrary to what Solomon said). But not enough right wingers believed it was credible to vote to impeach, not even in an election year! And the sole proof that the former AP and WaPo journalist points to to claim that the “legacy media” conceded he was right is a Glenn Kessler column (in the WaPo, though the impeachment report cited him rather than John Solomon’s propaganda), the week Kevin McCarthy approved the impeachment inquiry that itself, which still noted the consensus was that Viktor Shokin had to be fired. (Note, too, that Solomon does not release nor mention the still active investigation into Zlochevsky that Trump shut down in this period.) All Kessler conceded is that Biden changed his plans, not that anyone objected with it.
None of this salvages all the reasons Solomon’s past propaganda has been discredited. On the contrary, this is all unreliable for the same reasons his Hill propaganda is unreliable. He chooses not to examine the most basic context behind the breathless claims he makes.
It does, however, get him privileged access to the most sensitive intelligence files.
The post John Solomon’s Propaganda Technique: Keeping the “Who” “What” “When” Secret to Fool the Rubes appeared first on emptywheel.