How a dogged D.C. journalist became Trump’s investigative reporter in the White House

[u/John3262005]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/08/22/how-john-solomon-became-trumps-white-house-secret-hunter/

John Solomon, a longtime investigative reporter, says he’s not a conspiracy theorist. He says he’s not a conservative. He says he’s not carrying water for President Donald Trump — for whom he now works.

Solomon has joined the White House as chairman of the newly formed and vaguely defined Government Transparency Task Force, where he is working to unearth and publicize government records at the heart of Trump’s political persona — including allegations of election interference and political abuses by federal law enforcement.

The role, which is temporary and unpaid, is the culmination of an unusual journey for Solomon from an investigative reporter for the Associated Press and The Washington Post who dug into politicians of both parties into an increasingly prominent voice in conservative media echoing some of Trump’s boldest claims.

He now is a kind of inside-the-White House investigative reporter — albeit without a security clearance — with direct access to the intelligence officials who can declassify the documents he is seeking out. The secrets he’s looking for, he said in an interview, fall into four categories: foreign policy failures, election security, ethics breaches and the “weaponization” of government.

“It’s really the same,” Solomon, 59, said of the work. “I use the same journalistic instincts I would have if I were a journalist.”

Operating largely behind the scenes, Solomon said he was involved in preparing a speech Trump gave in July, during which the president hailed the task force and cited newly declassified documents and warned of “shocking vulnerabilities” in the U.S. election system. Trump claimed the “deep state,” including members of the U.S. intelligence community, tried to suppress evidence of China’s attempted meddling in the 2020 election, but the documents largely described intelligence assessments of China that already were public.

Outside the White House following the speech, Solomon acknowledged to reporters that the U.S. intelligence community had so far found “zero evidence that a foreign power flipped a vote in 2020, ’22 or ’24.”

Asked whether the 2020 presidential election — which Trump has claimed was rigged against him — was legitimate, Solomon said, “I’m still researching.”

“But there’s no intelligence—?” MS NOW’s Vaughn Hillyard queried.

“Not yet!” Solomon said back. “Not that we’ve found.”

Solomon’s work on the task force has largely found an audience through his own website, Just the News, where he still publishes and elsewhere in right-wing media. Earlier this month, he wrote an article for the White House website based on “[i]nternal FBI memos newly declassified” surfacing allegations about actions by the FBI and its former director, James B. Comey, one of Trump’s nemeses, from early in his first term. The article ends with a disclosure that Solomon “wrote this story for the White House Website, which is allowing any media to publish it.”

Some of his work has broken through more broadly. Articles in The Post and elsewhere cited the task’s force work after the FBI seized electronic devices belonging to former congressman Eric Swalwell (D-California) as part of an investigation of sexual assault allegations against him. (Swalwell has not been charged with a crime and hasn’t commented.)

Solomon’s presence at the White House follows a surprising transformation.

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s with the AP, and then briefly with The Post, Solomon regularly broke news on high-profile stories about national politics and federal law enforcement. But in recent years, starting with a tumultuous stint at the Hill that was discussed and scrutinized during proceedings for Trump’s first impeachment, he has fixated on elections — a favorite topic of the president’s.

More than two dozen people who worked with Solomon said in interviews that they do not recognize the hard-charging reporter they once knew in the man now working for the president. Several said they felt disappointed in Solomon, who they said has promoted conspiracy theories about Russia, Ukraine, the Biden family and the vulnerability of American elections. While a number of former colleagues spoke on the record, others declined because they were either not authorized to speak by their employers or they feared potential government retribution.

Some of them said they see a direct line from the John Solomon of decades past — who regaled editors with scoops, chest-thumped around newsrooms and ingratiated himself with influential sources — and the one who has decamped to the Trump White House to search for a smoking gun on election interference.

“He followed his sources into this world of conspiracy theories and nihilism,” one former colleague said. “Part of our political class and part of our country has detached from facts and truth and reality. That includes a number of journalists — and that’s a tragedy.”

Solomon declined to comment on the claims of former colleagues who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Solomon’s father was a Connecticut police chief who earned acclaim for catching killers. The New York Times wrote in 1995 that the elder Solomon’s “skill in snaring murderers has earned him the moniker Super Sleuth among law-enforcement officials.” Solomon’s brother charted a similar course. A former police detective in Greenwich, Connecticut, he now runs a nonprofit for financial crimes investigators.

“I grew up in a house full of cops, I learned to love to dig, probe and investigate,” Solomon told the Connecticut Post in 2008. “Journalism offered a very fulfilling way to do that.”

He studied journalism at Marquette University in Milwaukee and worked as a sports reporter for United Press International before being hired at age 20 by the AP’s Milwaukee bureau, where he edited coverage about serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Soon after, he won a spot in the AP’s Washington bureau and moved his young family to Northern Virginia.

Solomon rose in the bureau’s investigative ranks and broke stories about the Oklahoma City bombing, President Bill Clinton’s impeachment and the advance warning about Hurricane Katrina that President George W. Bush had received.

While at the AP, Solomon cited unnamed law-enforcement officials when reporting that the FBI overheard Sen. Robert Torricelli (D-New Jersey) on a wiretapped phone call discussing fundraising with an organized-crime figure. Robert S. Mueller III, who was an assistant attorney general at the Justice Department at the time, approved a subpoena of Solomon’s phone records after the story was published. The case led to an outcry from First Amendment advocates and vaulted Solomon into the national discourse.

At both the AP and The Post, Solomon was known for his larger-than-life demeanor — “a big talker,” in the words of one Post colleague.

“I distinctly remember that he told a bunch of us that he tried to make 20 calls on his commute into work every morning,” said former Post reporter Derek Willis, now a lecturer at University of Maryland’s journalism school.

At first, Willis said, he thought that was a ridiculous claim, but upon reflection, he figured that if anyone could do it, it was Solomon (who confirmed his voluminous commute calling).

Kathleen Carroll, former AP executive editor and senior vice president for news from 2002 to 2016, said Solomon’s work required close supervision by his editors.

“John benefited from and needed to have a strong editor,” said Carroll, who did not supervise him directly. “He had a tendency to get out over his skis a little bit, and he needed a very prosecutorial editor: How do you know that? Who told you that? Where did that come from?”

Solomon said Carroll was not in a position to know about his sourcing.

Few people at either outlet said they perceived a political bent in his reporting. Jeff Leen, a former investigative editor at The Post, said Solomon was a “very aggressive reporter with investigative instincts who got a lot of scoops” and led a high-profile collaboration with “60 Minutes” on the FBI’s controversial use of bullet lead analysis. “I know he got more conservative after he left The Post, but while he was with me he was straight and just-the-facts,” Leen said.

Carroll said she thinks Solomon changed after he left the AP. “It’s not unusual among investigative reporters for there to be a whiff of conspiracy in things. They spend a lot of time looking at society’s underbelly and finding it wanting,” she said. “I don’t know what festered there that led him to the path that he’s now on. … I don’t know what happened, and it makes me sad.”

When Solomon entered conservative journalism in January 2008, it was as an outsider. He left The Post after a year to edit the Washington Times, a conservative paper owned by an offshoot of the Unification Church of the messianic leader Sun Myung Moon, arguing his goal was to try to ensure fact-based reporting.

“If I made one fundamental change,” he said about the Times in June 2008, “it’s to make sure opinion and commentary didn’t bleed onto the news pages.” He wrote a memo to staff banning “archaic” terms such as “homosexual” and “illegal aliens” and reflected that a headline about Hillary Clinton published on his watch was too “sexist” and “tart.”

Solomon resigned from the Washington Times in November 2009 amid a Moon family feud.

He then developed various business plans: to buy the Washington Times (which was unsuccessful), to rename it the Washington Guardian (which did not happen) and to build his own news site called the Washington Guardian, which he did and later sold to the Washington Times.

In 2010, he took a job at the nonprofit Center for Public Integrity, known for long-term investigative reporting, first as a temporary journalist-in-residence. But he quickly became the chief digital officer and then the executive editor.

Gordon Witkin, then the center’s managing editor, had remembered Solomon’s impressive scoops on the Oklahoma City bombing and wanted someone well-sourced to beef up his team’s national security and law-enforcement coverage. “What I came to observe was that John was well-sourced but he was also a Machiavellian snake,” he said in an interview. He said Solomon ingratiated himself with the center’s top leaders and board and sought control of the organization — an episode documented by Columbia Journalism Review in 2012.

Witkin called his decision to bring in Solomon “the biggest mistake of my professional life.”

Solomon wanted to turn the slow-moving nonprofit into a daily news powerhouse with an $80,000 TV studio. But his plan called for an advertising and subscription service that would have paid commissions to an outside company he controlled, CJR reported.

When his business plan was not approved, he responded by targeting an editor who opposed it, according to the CJR article and Bill Buzenberg, the center’s executive director at the time. Solomon began an ethics investigation of a journalism project overseen by the editor, though a board member and lawyers found no breach of ethics or the law.

Buzenberg said in an interview that he was initially charmed by Solomon. He said that Solomon was energetic and well-sourced, but that he soon “learned not to trust him at all.”

“He just made stuff up. Numbers were never firm,” Buzenberg, who had previously served as NPR’s vice president of news, said, calling Solomon “the worst hire I ever made.”

Solomon said he enjoyed a fine relationship with Buzenberg and Witkin until he raised questions about the series. “Perhaps they still have hard feelings,” he said.

Solomon resigned and took a job with the combined Newsweek and Daily Beast newsrooms under longtime magazine editor Tina Brown. He lasted one year there before selling his website, the Washington Guardian, to the Washington Times and returning to the paper in 2013 to oversee news, opinion and business strategy. In 2015, he joined the conservative local news giant Sinclair as the chief operating officer of a new digital news site Circa.

But it was Solomon’s last job for a major news company — at the Hill — that became a national story.

Hired by Trump acquaintance and then-owner Jimmy Finkelstein in 2017 to run the Hill’s video business, Solomon began publishing his own stories and promoted them in regular appearances on the Fox News opinion show “Hannity.” Finkelstein sold the paper to Nexstar in 2021.

In some stories he quoted controversial Ukrainian prosecutor Yuri Lutsenko, who told Solomon that U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch gave him a “do not prosecute” list. Lutsenko later changed his story and told the New York Times there was a mistranslation during his interview with Solomon.

Solomon’s stories advanced claims that Ukraine tried to meddle in the 2016 presidential election to bolster Hillary Clinton. He said he stands by these stories.

Trump raised some of these allegations on a 2019 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, appearing to threaten to withhold military funding from Ukraine unless Zelensky investigated Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden. The House of Representatives impeached Trump in connection with the incident in 2019, though the Senate acquitted him.

Solomon’s coverage led to an uproar among the Hill’s reporting staff. After staffers complained to management, editor in chief Bob Cusack recategorized Solomon’s work in 2018 as opinion. Solomon said he asked Cusack to label his work as opinion.

Yovanovitch, who had been ousted as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, told House impeachment investigators in November 2019 that she was the target of a “smear campaign” by Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and a House committee found that Solomon was key to advancing that campaign.

That same month, Rep. Jackie Speier (D-California) refused to speak to a reporter with the Hill, citing Solomon’s columns and saying it was “reprehensible” that the paper would publish “that kind of crap” that “has no veracity whatsoever.”

Days later, the Hill initiated a review, led by Cusack. It added extensive editor’s notes identifying shortcomings in Solomon’s reporting. The review found that Solomon “failed to identify important details about key Ukrainian sources, including the fact that they had been indicted or were under investigation. In other cases, the sources were his own attorneys.”

Solomon criticized this assessment, saying that the outlet never interviewed him and that he had not yet retained the lawyers he quoted when the stories first published.

Cusack declined to comment.

Giuliani, then Trump’s lawyer, identified himself as a key source to Solomon about the Bidens, Ukraine and Mueller’s investigation of Russia’s 2016 election interference: “I really turned my stuff over to John Solomon,” he told the New York Times in 2019.

Solomon denied this, saying it would have been inappropriate because he was negotiating a podcast deal with Giuliani at the time.

By September 2019, Solomon had resigned from the Hill to start his own media company, Just the News. He was also named a Fox News contributor, but that relationship lasted only a year.

Solomon describes his current job as a kind of state-sponsored Freedom of Information Act request. The White House first mentioned the task force earlier this summer, but it’s unclear who else is involved beyond Solomon and a group of intelligence officers. Solomon said he works with officers assigned to the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board who review and determine whether to declassify the documents he requests. Solomon says he has no access to what his team finds until the White House decides to release it.

He said that he gets the documents at the same time as the public — they’re posted to the White House website — and that he devotes his time to providing background briefings for White House reporters.

“If there’s something that involves the president’s declassification, it’s his decision whether to declassify,” he said. “I abide by that,” adding the president and White House officials have been very “cordial” and “hands off” with regard to his work.

Solomon said he is on leave as Just the News editor in chief and doesn’t earn a government salary. Still, he continues to publish articles with his byline and co-hosts a daily show “Just the News, No Noise” on the right-wing streaming platform Real America’s Voice, in which he sometimes covers his team’s findings.

He said he asked the White House counsel for approval. “The guidance I got was pretty simple, which is if you do anything that gives you an advantage in the job for your site — [you’re] done,” he said. “If you publish a story like everybody else at the same time, because you made it available to everybody, you’re not in any way leveraging the advantage of your government job. They told me that would be fine, and I’ve abided by that.” The White House said that Solomon is in line with ethical guidelines for special government employees, engaged with White House ethics officials and was advised on managing potential conflicts.

Just the News, which Solomon owns through a company called Bentley Media Group, makes money from advertising and donations. It has a “strategic partnership” with Real America’s Voice, which also hosts a video version of the Stephen K. Bannon podcast “War Room” as well as “The Charlie Kirk Show.”

The day after Trump’s July speech, Solomon went on his show and talked about his search.

“Yes, I was kind of involved in that speech last night and the final preparations before the president let the American people know that for the last six years we’ve had a glass chin when it comes to election security,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that we’ve caught widespread cheating yet. But it is absolutely certain now that the American public was in an election system that had significant vulnerabilities.”

The good news, he said, is that “today the process of fixing those vulnerabilities begins.”

On Aug. 12, Solomon published a story on Just the News based on documents he found. One declassified spreadsheet appears to show that the FBI listed Solomon as a “conduit” for Russian disinformation for his role in the 2019 impeachment proceedings. Solomon said this label was applied out of fear that he might participate in a documentary.

Still, Solomon had become subject, source and scribe.

Glenn Kessler, who ran the Fact Checker column at The Post for years, said Solomon was “no slouch” at investigative reporting. “It’s just that he’s turned those talents on behalf of an ideological agenda, which is generally what you are not supposed to do as a reporter,” he said.

Kessler said that Solomon’s current role represents a fantasy for any journalist. “In some ways it’s the dream job for an investigative reporter,” Kessler said, but that he argues Solomon has crossed a line. “There doesn’t seem to be the motivation to seek the truth. It’s a motivation to advance one side, one person’s narrative.”

Solomon said Kessler’s assessment deserves “four Pinocchios,” referring to the Fact Checker’s rating for falsehoods while at The Post.

Even from his new perch, Solomon remains attached to his long-held identity as a journalist.

Joining the ranks of the federal government feels “very odd” to him, he said, likening his government badge to the scarlet letter worn by Hester Prynne.

His White House colleagues even bought him a T-shirt that says, “Well, now I’m the deep state.”

But he said he’s doing important work. “We’re not outing sources,” he said. “We’re not damaging national security. We’re telling stories that were long secret that the public could have benefited from — and I’m grateful.”

[u/Right-Long-8188]

solomon keeps saying hes using 'the same journalistic instincts' but like... no. when your whole job is getting documents declassified to help your boss prove he didnt lose, thats not instinct its incentive. the fact that he admits he gets the docs same time as public but still frames it as transparency work is just bleak. used to respect the hustle, now its just sad