Donald Trump did something no president has ever done Thursday night. He released official proof of a foreign operation to interfere in an American election. The operation was Russian. The beneficiary was Trump.
That is not his intention. What he meant to do was prove China stole 2020, and he built the biggest stage of his presidency for it: five and a half years of stolen-election promises, a week of hype about really big news, the East Room, the flag, the seal, a primetime slot he fought the networks to fill. All of it resting on a stack of declassified intelligence assessments, each page stamped in red, “DECLASSIFIED BY PRESIDENT TRUMP on 3 July 2026,” waved around as the proof that was finally going to arrive.
Somebody should have read them first.
Because one of those documents, a National Intelligence Council assessment from 2020, says that Putin and senior Russian officials personally oversaw proxies spreading claims that Joe Biden “engaged in criminal activity in his dealings with Ukraine and individuals tied to Ukrainian energy firm Burisma.” It names the proxies, Andriy Derkach and Konstantin Kilimnik. It describes how the material was meant to move, through figures “advancing such narratives with US officials and other prominent persons as well as online, including through personal interactions and audio and documentary film releases via US and Ukrainian media outlets.” It sat classified for six years, in an assessment dated August 19, 2020, until the man it’s about stamped his own name on it and released it as his vindication. And then comes the sentence you should read twice. The Russian proxies were working “to orchestrate a high-profile corruption scandal implicating former Vice President Biden and the Democratic Party at the peak of the 2020 US presidential campaign. Their aim is to defeat the former Vice President and ensure the President’s victory.”
“Ensure the President’s victory.” That is an American intelligence document, declassified by Donald Trump to prove that foreign powers steal elections, stating that Vladimir Putin ran an operation to help win one for Donald Trump. Sam Stein caught the passage Thursday night and called it “really incredible,” which is generous. The president went looking for evidence that China robbed him and entered the opposing brief into evidence with his own name on the cover.
And the documents don’t bury this, they chart it. One release includes the intelligence community’s own scorecard of foreign election meddling, a grid of checkmarks by country, and the only country marked as actually observed targeting American election processes and systems is Russia. China, the villain of Thursday’s speech, gets a hollow circle: preliminary steps. The president released a report card to convict Beijing, and the report card gives Moscow the only failing grade that matters. (H/T Will Sommer.)
That’s the part everyone will write today, and it’s plenty. It is not the crazy part.
The crazy part is who released it, because the man running Trump’s declassification task force is John Solomon. Sit with the full circle here, because in my three-plus decades of covering media, I’ve never seen anything like it. Trump hired the journalist who did as much as anyone alive to build the Biden-Ukraine corruption scandal in American media. He put that man in charge of digging through the classified archive for proof that 2020 was stolen. And the document that man found, stamped, and published to the world is the intelligence community describing the scandal he championed as the objective of a Russian influence operation designed to reelect the president who just hired him. If a screenwriter pitched this, the studio would send it back for being too on the nose.
If you don’t remember how big Solomon was in 2019 and 2020, you weren’t watching Fox News primetime, because he was unavoidable. His columns at The Hill were the sourcing layer for the entire Burisma-Shokin storyline, the claim that Biden strong-armed Ukraine into firing a prosecutor to protect his son, and he took that storyline to the largest audience in cable news, appearing on Hannity again and again, month after month, as the featured investigative voice walking millions of viewers through the great Biden corruption scandal.
Rudy Giuliani himself described the arrangement plainly at the time: Solomon wrote the columns, Giuliani promoted them on television. Fox News’ own internal research operation grew alarmed enough to warn staff about disinformation flowing through Solomon and Giuliani. The Hill was eventually embarrassed enough to review his Ukraine columns and staple editor’s notes to them. None of it slowed the story down. For a stretch of the Trump presidency, the Biden-Ukraine corruption narrative was arguably the most valuable content franchise on the American right, Solomon was one of its principal architects, and the assessment his own task force just released describes the operation's proxy actors anticipating one thing above all: that “US persons are key to propagating these narratives.”
A smear with no distribution is just a guy in Kyiv with a folder. Moscow’s problem was never manufacturing the Burisma story. Its problem was getting Americans to believe it, and for that it needed American voices with American credibility talking to American audiences. The assessment describes the intended distribution model. The public record, built in real time and much of it by Trump’s own government, shows the ecosystem that performed it. Treasury sanctioned Derkach in September 2020 as a Russian agent of more than a decade, specifically for pushing edited audio tapes meant to smear Biden before the election. Giuliani had met with Derkach in Kyiv months earlier, trailed by an OAN crew, and Chanel Rion put him on camera. Giuliani cut Ukraine material into documentary-style specials. Solomon’s columns, drawing on his own Ukrainian sources, fed the same storyline into Fox News’ opinion hours night after night. Nobody has to claim these men were taking orders, and I’m not. Multiple Russian- and Ukrainian-linked figures were supplying compatible material into the same eager American system, and the system did what it was built to do.
The defense from Solomon’s corner will arrive on schedule, and it will be that the underlying materials were real. Real prosecutor, real firing, real Hunter Biden on a real Burisma board. Fine, and also beside the point, because the most effective influence operations don’t need everything to be fake. You take true raw material, curate it, time it, and aim it, which is exactly what the assessment describes: an orchestrated scandal, not an invented one. Biden did pressure Ukraine to fire Shokin. Hunter did sit on Burisma’s board. The false load-bearing inference, the connective claim that made the whole scandal work, was that the first fact existed to protect the second, when firing Shokin was the stated policy of the entire Western alliance precisely because he was failing to pursue corruption, the Burisma file included. Russia didn’t need to fake anything. It needed Americans to assemble true pieces into a false story, and Americans obliged.
That’s the actual insight buried in Trump’s document dump, and it’s more disturbing than collusion because collusion would at least give you someone to fire. The Russians built a story perfectly shaped for the conservative media appetite, a story that flattered the audience, wounded the enemy, and filled the nine o’clock hour, then seeded it through cutouts and let the incentives do the rest. A mechanism like that can run without a single participant consciously agreeing to help Russia, which means removing any one of them fixes nothing. The people who wrote that assessment understood the economics of right-wing cable better than the people running it.
How does a White House release its own rebuttal? Easy: nobody involved thought of these documents as documents. This was a content rollout from the start, pre-briefed under NDAs to a couple dozen election-denial activists in a session Cleta Mitchell put together before any news organization saw a page, per MS NOW’s reporting. One attendee described the presentation as basically material Solomon had already reported. And here's the detail that completes the farce: the declassification stamp on the pages reads July 3. The release came the night of the speech, July 16. The documents sat stamped and ready for nearly two weeks, and in all that time, nobody involved appears to have read what they were about to hand the world. In that world the conclusion comes first and the exhibits exist to be waved, not read. The fact-checkers were the only ones in America who did the reading, and the reading turned out to be the whole story.
Will any of this move Trump’s base? Of course not. The faithful will skip past the NIC assessment to whatever pages of the batch flatter the cause, and the hoax reflex runs deep enough to survive contact with the president’s own signature. But the hoax defense was never really built for the base. It was built for everyone else, the persuadable middle, the nervous senators, the institutionalists who needed permission to look away, and it worked because every prior Russia finding could be sourced to an enemy. Mueller was the Democrats. The Senate Intelligence report was the deep state. This one Trump declassified himself, released it the night of his own speech to make his own argument and it says Putin personally oversaw an operation to smear Biden and ensure Trump’s victory. The document didn’t change any minds in the base. It changed what everyone else is allowed to pretend not to know.
Fox News, for its part, sensed the exposure. The network carried Thursday’s speech swaddled in caveats, with White House correspondent Aishah Hasnie telling viewers on air that Fox News hadn’t seen the evidence and couldn’t vouch for the president’s claims, and by Friday morning its flagship show had moved on entirely. A network that wrote a $787.5 million check the last time it ran this genre unfiltered knows the smell. But Fox News is a footnote to the real story here.
The real story is Solomon, who went on MS NOW minutes after the speech ended and admitted “the intelligence community has zero evidence” that any foreign power flipped a vote in 2020, 2022 or 2024. Asked the obvious follow-up, whether that means 2020 was legitimate, the man hired specifically to prove otherwise said, “I’m still researching.”
He just published the research. He should read it.
Correction: an earlier version of this column said the intelligence assessment quoted here had been publicly released in 2021. The document is an August 19, 2020 National Intelligence Council assessment declassified in the July 16 release.
What a clown car this White House is...day after day. Unfortunately, not remotely funny since 2017....