Trump's Favorite Journalist Says Clinton Caused Russia Probe. Sure, John.

The Theory, Laid Out Flat

Here is what Solomon is actually arguing, as reported by the New York Post. In late 2015, Hillary Clinton's campaign conducted internal polling on which Clinton-world scandals voters found most alarming. Not Whitewater. Not Monica Lewinsky. Not the private email server. According to Solomon, what scared voters most was Uranium One, the deal through which a Russian-connected company gained access to American uranium assets while Bill Clinton collected a $500,000 speaking fee from Moscow and Hillary Clinton was serving as Secretary of State.

Solomon's claim, delivered on Miranda Devine's podcast 'Pod Force One,' is that Clinton's team saw this polling data, panicked, and decided the best move was to manufacture a Russian collusion narrative around Donald Trump. 'They need to project their sins on Donald Trump,' Solomon said, 'to neutralize Hillary Clinton's campaign.' The theory then extends to the hiring of Fusion GPS, the Steele dossier, former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann's trip to the FBI with Alfa Bank data, and ultimately the entire Mueller investigation. A decade of federal probes, all traceable, Solomon insists, to one bad poll in November 2015.

That is the argument. We are going to spend some time with it.

Who Is Telling You This and Why It Matters

John Solomon is not a random commentator. He is the founder of Just the News, a conservative media outlet, and he currently serves as the head of a Trump administration task force on government transparency. He is, in other words, a Trump ally who is paid by the Trump administration while simultaneously appearing on pro-Trump media to advance pro-Trump narratives. This does not automatically make him wrong. It does mean you should hold his claims to a higher evidentiary standard before treating them as revelations.

The podcast where Solomon made these claims is hosted by Miranda Devine, a New York Post columnist whose previous journalistic achievements include playing a central role in amplifying the Hunter Biden laptop story in the weeks before the 2020 election. The New York Post covered Solomon's appearance as news. 'Pod Force One' is described in the Post's own article as a venue for 'exclusive and candid conversations with the most influential disruptors in Washington.' Disruptors. That's the word they chose.

Solomon has been making versions of this argument for years. The specific framing shifts, the supporting details get rearranged, but the core claim has been a staple of conservative media since at least 2017. What is new here is the specific polling origin story and the explicit claim that Barack Obama was personally briefed on Clinton's 'plan to foment a fake scandal' and did nothing to stop it.

What the Record Actually Shows

A few things worth establishing clearly. The Steele dossier was real, and it was funded through Perkins Coie, Clinton's campaign law firm, via Fusion GPS. That part is documented and not disputed. Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer, compiled it. Michael Sussmann did go to the FBI with data purportedly linking Trump to Alfa Bank. These are facts.

What is also documented is that the Mueller investigation, which consumed those 'two and a half years of America's political conscience' Solomon laments, found that Russia did in fact interfere in the 2016 election, and found it did so in ways that benefited Trump's campaign. Mueller did not establish a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, but he explicitly did not exonerate Trump on obstruction. The Steele dossier being discredited in several of its specific claims is not the same thing as the Russia investigation being a hoax built from nothing.

The Uranium One story, meanwhile, has been thoroughly investigated. Congressional Republicans spent years on it. The Justice Department under Trump opened a review. The conclusion, reached repeatedly by people who were not Hillary Clinton fans, was that the deal went through a multi-agency review process, that Clinton's personal involvement was minimal, and that no quid pro quo was established. The $500,000 speaking fee to Bill Clinton is real and genuinely worth scrutinizing. The rest of Solomon's framing around it has not held up to independent scrutiny.

The Obama Accusation Is the New Part

The most explosive claim in Solomon's latest telling is the addition of Obama. 'Even briefed the President of the United States, Barack Obama, at the time, and nobody stops it,' Solomon said, referring to Obama allegedly being told about Clinton's 'plan to foment a fake scandal.' The New York Post reports this assertion without any supporting documentation, sourcing, or named corroboration.

This matters because if true, it would be genuinely enormous. A sitting president knowingly allowing a major party candidate to manufacture a federal investigation targeting a political opponent would be one of the most serious abuses of power in American history. If Solomon has evidence for this, we would like to see it. As of this reporting, what exists is Solomon saying it happened on a podcast. That's not nothing. It is also not evidence.

The pattern here is one Solomon has used before: take documented facts, like the Fusion GPS hiring or the Sussmann FBI meeting, and use them as the credible anchoring detail for a much larger, undocumented claim. The documented facts are real. The sweeping conclusion drawn from them is where the argument quietly leaves the building.

Why This Story Is Running Now

Solomon is the head of a Trump administration task force on government transparency. The task force, as the New York Post notes, is focused on exactly this kind of historical grievance: relitigating investigations into Trump as politically motivated persecution. The timing of 'new revelations' that support the administration's existing narrative, delivered on the administration's friendly media ecosystem, is not a coincidence. It is a production.

The Russia investigation ended. Trump was not charged with conspiracy. He is now serving a second term. And yet the need to relitigate 2016 and 2017 as a massive Democratic conspiracy apparently does not diminish with time or vindication. If anything it intensifies, because the story is no longer about exoneration. It is about punishment. About establishing, through the apparatus of a sympathetic administration, that the people who ran the investigation were criminals. That is what Solomon's task force is actually for, and 'Pod Force One' is where the findings get their pre-release publicity tour.