Useful Idiot: John Solomon Went Digging for Election Interference and Found ... Himself

Every chapter of the Biden-Burisma saga carries his byline. On Thursday, he declassified the intelligence file describing who was behind the story.

This is a foreign interference story too stupid for any respectable screenwriter to touch. It also happens to be true, and it broke Thursday night.

John Solomon was hired by Donald Trump to dig through the classified files and prove that American elections have been compromised by foreign interference. On Thursday night he delivered the documents, and here is the most bizarre, boneheaded, and underreported item you will read all year: the documents prove there was interference. It was Russian. It was run to elect Trump. It worked by manufacturing a corruption scandal about Joe Biden and a Ukrainian energy company called Burisma. And the useful idiot at the center of that operation’s American success, the journalist who built the scandal’s American media franchise and carried it onto Fox News primetime night after night for years, was John Solomon.

I wrote Friday about the backfire itself: Trump, trying to prove 2020 was stolen from him, released his own intelligence community’s finding that Russia manufactured the Biden-Burisma scandal to help elect him, through an operation built to travel on prominent American voices (that column, with the documents quoted at length, is here). I thought that was the most spectacular self-own I would ever cover. I had missed the crazier part. Solomon didn’t merely appear in Friday’s story. He ran the task force that hand-picked the documents laying out the operation his own seven years of work had served. And “useful idiot” is the charitable reading: the assessment doesn’t name him, nothing proves he knowingly served anyone, and that is precisely the point. Russia designed an operation whose success depended on Americans doing exactly what Solomon was already doing, and the government’s account of it has now entered the public record by Solomon’s own hand, on the orders of the president it was built to elect.

Solomon made two television appearances that night. On CBS, he told Tony Dokoupil the address was airtight: “Every intelligence chief vetted this speech. They made sure it was accurate.” Then MS NOW’s Vaughn Hillyard caught up with him on the White House lawn, unscheduled, and Solomon, looking caught off guard, conceded that “the intelligence community has zero evidence” that any foreign power flipped a vote in 2020, 2022 or 2024, and when Hillyard pressed the obvious follow-up, whether that means 2020 was legitimate, he said, “I’m still researching.” Fully vetted on one network, still researching on the other, within the same few hours. On the set he came prepared for, the speech was bulletproof. On the lawn, the case dissolved on contact with one follow-up question.

The beginning is dated. On April 1, 2019, Solomon, then a columnist at The Hill, published “Joe Biden’s 2020 Ukrainian nightmare” and began building the claim that would dominate conservative media into the impeachment: Joe Biden strong-armed Ukraine into firing prosecutor Viktor Shokin to protect Burisma, the energy company that had his son on its board. The claim collapsed on the merits long ago, since firing Shokin was the stated policy of the entire Western alliance; Friday’s column has the details. What matters here is the trajectory. Solomon took the storyline to Fox News and became inescapable, 139 weekday appearances by Media Matters’ February 2020 count, most of them on Hannity. And when the whistleblower complaint that triggered the impeachment cited his columns three times, Fox News responded by hiring him as a paid contributor, in October 2019, at the very peak of the fight.

Then came the verdicts, and they came from his own side. In early 2020, Fox News’ research division, the Brain Room, produced a 162-page internal briefing on the Ukraine story. It concluded that Solomon “played an indispensable role in the collection and domestic publication of elements of this disinformation campaign.” That is not a media critic’s phrase or a Democrat’s. It is the finding of the researchers employed by the network that kept booking him. Days after the memo made news, The Hill completed its own review of his Ukraine columns and stapled editor’s notes to fourteen of them, faulting his failures to disclose key facts about his sources. And on February 21, 2020, two days after that public rebuke, Lou Dobbs introduced him on Fox Business as an “award winning investigative reporter.” The industry’s correction mechanisms all fired, and none of them mattered. Fox News finally parted ways with Solomon, quietly, in November 2020, once the election was over and the story had done its work. He landed on his feet at his own outlet, Just the News, and in 2022 Trump named him a representative to the National Archives.

The story came back, and so did he. In 2023, congressional Republicans began publicizing an FBI form containing an informant’s claim that Burisma’s founder had paid Joe and Hunter Biden $5 million each to make the Ukrainian investigation go away, the Shokin story wearing an FBI document as a costume. Fox News ran it nightly, and when Chuck Grassley released the form on July 20, Solomon was back on Hannity the very next night, on a panel dissecting it, four years after the first run. The informant was Alexander Smirnov. In February 2024 a special counsel first appointed by Trump indicted him; the charging documents said his claims “were false, as the Defendant knew,” and prosecutors told a court that “officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved in passing a story” about Hunter Biden. Smirnov pleaded guilty, admitting contact with Russian intelligence officials, and drew six years. To be clear about the boundary: Solomon didn’t source the form, and nothing connects him to Smirnov; he was one of its cable commentators. But the sequel to the story he built ended in a federal prison sentence, with Russian intelligence in the court record, and there he was on the couch again while it happened.

Any of this would end most careers in journalism. It elevated his. Last month the White House brought Solomon inside, as a special government employee, to lead what it calls a government transparency task force, a job whose whole point, whatever the name on the door, is surfacing proof that 2020 was stolen. The man who built the scandal was handed the keys to the archive that held the intelligence community’s description of it. And this was no bulk dump he never touched. By his own account on CBS, the release was curated: “Thousands of pages of reports that we went through. We put several hundred of them out tonight.” He is fluent in this corpus; he cited a different NIC assessment, by month, from memory, on live television the same night. His task force went through thousands of pages, chose several hundred, stamped them in red ink, and released them attached to a presidential address, as vindication. The Russia assessment made his cut. He picked it. Out of thousands of pages, the man Fox News’ own researchers called indispensable to spreading this story selected, for public release, the document explaining why Russia needed it spread. Solomon did not find proof the election was stolen. He found, and published, the government’s account of how his own signature story was supposed to work.

Line the career up end to end and try to keep a straight face. He writes the story. The story makes him a cable news star. His network’s own researchers flag his role in a disinformation campaign, in writing. The network quietly drops him. The story comes back; so does he. The source of the sequel goes to federal prison, with Russian intelligence in the court record. Trump hires him to find foreign election interference. He finds it. He publishes it. It describes an operation that needed someone doing exactly what he had been doing for seven years. Asked whether the election was legitimate, he says he is still researching.

Either Solomon knowingly served a foreign influence operation, which no document proves and which he has always denied, or he is the most consequential useful idiot in the modern history of American media, a man whose instincts for what his audience wanted were so reliable that a hostile intelligence service could design an operation around them without ever needing to tell him anything. The second version is worse for the profession, because it means the manipulation required no contact at all, only an ecosystem that would reward the story and a byline that would keep telling it.

Fox News, for what it’s worth, has barely mentioned Thursday’s speech; its flagship morning show went its entire opening hour Friday without a word, and there may be a simple reason a network that was warned about this story by its own researchers six years ago would rather not dwell on the document that just confirmed the warning. But the network was only ever the stage.

Asked whether the election at the heart of it all was legitimate, the man who has spent seven years on the question could offer only that he is still researching.

It is, at this point, the one claim of his that nobody can dispute.