Read the full transcript of award-winning investigative journalist John Solomon’s interview on American Thought Leaders podcast with Epoch Times Senior Editor Jan Jekielek episode titled “After 9 Years of Investigation, Here’s What I Uncovered”, Premiered August 24, 2025.
American Thought Leaders Interview: John Solomon on Nine Years of Russiagate Investigation
JAN JEKIELEK: This is American Thought Leaders, and I’m Jan Jekielek. John Solomon, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
JOHN SOLOMON: Yeah, good to join you, Jan.
JAN JEKIELEK: It’s been much too long, frankly.
JOHN SOLOMON: Goes by fast, doesn’t it?
The Lonely Field of Early Russiagate Reporting
JAN JEKIELEK: You’ve been doing some incredible reporting related to the newest revelations to Russiagate, or what’s called the Russia hoax, or what we called Spygate back in the day. It was a pretty lonely field back in the day. You know, I remember you were one of the few, Lee Smith, with his famous “Plot Against the President.” The little corner of Twitter, if you recall. We pulled some people into our ranks, Jeff Carlson, Hans Mahncke among them. I’m just thinking off the top of my head of some people who did amazing work on all this stuff.
JOHN SOLOMON: Yeah, Federalist did good work.
JAN JEKIELEK: Sarah Carter, absolutely. Sarah Carter, Molly Hemingway and the whole Federalist gang now. But bottom line, where we stand today, did Russia actually interfere in the election in 2016?
What Russia Actually Did vs. The Narrative
JOHN SOLOMON: The Russians did what they’ve done in almost every election since the post-Cold War era ended, which is to use the KGB playbook to sow dissension in America to create division. And by the way, it wasn’t limited to just the presidential election. It involves climate change, it involves lots of things.
There was nothing different about what Russia actually did in the 2016 election that they hadn’t done before in 2012, 2008, 2004, 2000. What it wasn’t was the grandiose plan that we were all force-fed to believe for a period of time in 2017 and 2018. President Putin did not have a specific victor in mind. He wasn’t trying to put his weight behind one or the other.
The career people in the intelligence community knew that because the evidence said that. And what gets lost in all of the conversations we’ve had is that after the election, the best and smartest people we have that watch Russia for a living in the intelligence community decided that Vladimir Putin did not interfere in the election in trying to help one candidate or the other, that he didn’t have an impact. He didn’t penetrate the election systems of America.
The reason they were so certain of it is what happened in the final month of the election. Most Americans make their mind up in October, before election season. About 60% of Americans make up their mind in the final couple of weeks. We now know from the intelligence that’s been declassified that Vladimir Putin pulled out all of his active measures in October, didn’t try to tip the election one way or the other.
Now, there are some assessments as to why he thought it was inevitable that Hillary Clinton would win and it would be better to dirty her up afterwards. Other assessments were that he just never wanted to intervene. So they came to that conclusion, and Barack Obama’s administration didn’t like it. And so they whipsawed the intelligence community to come up with a different narrative that would fit the narrative that had already been planted at the FBI months before. And that is the Steele dossier and all that goes alongside of it.
Why This Matters: A Historic Threshold Crossed
So people say, “Well, why should I care now? We’ve heard about this for nine years. Why should we care about it now? Isn’t this just a political dirty trick?” And the answer is, in the history of America, we’ve always had political dirty tricks. By the way, in the 1790s, our politics were pretty rough and tumble. Maybe it made some of this stuff look like kid stuff. In the 1800s, it was pretty rough and tumble.
What sets aside the 2016 election and everything else that followed from it is that for the first time in our history, the intelligence apparatus of America and the law enforcement apparatus of America participated in a political dirty trick. They enabled it, they legitimized it, they extended it, when the evidence suggests that it shouldn’t be. That is the precipice upon which we’ve never passed before. We haven’t crossed that threshold in American politics before.
People say, “Well, didn’t that happen in Watergate?” And the answer is, well, there was a little bit of Watergate. Obviously, there was a break-in. And then the President of the United States, at the time Richard Nixon, contemplated having the CIA block the FBI from doing it. The fact that a tape came out showing that he contemplated using the CIA to block the FBI’s ability to solve the burglary led the Republican Party to abandon their president. He actually didn’t use the CIA. He didn’t actually carry through all the way through it. The CIA wouldn’t do it.
Here you have the FBI and the CIA fully integrated into the plot and all of the key leaders of the country being aware before it started that that was probably going to happen. There’s an intercept. Rather than stop it, they enable it, they allow it to go forward, they go get FISA warrants, they reanalyze the intelligence to come up with a different narrative. And ironically, the original intercepts predicted that the FBI would become involved in legitimizing this political dirty trick.
So the new evidence tells us that the government inextricably assisted, furthered, extended, legitimized, a political dirty trick. And that is a chapter that never before in our history has been really done. And I think that’s why, regardless of your political stripe, you should be concerned about what happened. Because if this becomes the norm in America, we go from the greatest country, constitutional republic in America, the envy of the world for freedom, to another banana republic that looks like the Latin American dictators of the 1960s.
And it’s our generation’s responsibility to stop that from happening.
Thus far, we haven’t done a very good job. We’ve exposed it, but we haven’t stopped the temptation to do it again.
The Question of Institutional Responsibility
JAN JEKIELEK: Before we go any further, something just struck me and there’s this tendency to paint agencies or groups of people with the same brush. When we talk about the intelligence community, of course there’s all these agencies, notably you mentioned the CIA and the FBI. But it’s not a monolithic block of people that think all exactly the same way. And indeed, there’s efforts happening as we speak at some kind of reform. There’s been people that have lost their clearances. Is it reasonable to just say the FBI, the CIA, whatever, the intel committees, just as a kind of always pejorative?
JOHN SOLOMON: Listen, the people are policy. And the people who ran the CIA, the people who ran the FBI used those institutions to foment a dirty trick on the American people to mislead us. And in doing so, they used some of the most awesome tools that we gave them, particularly after 9/11, to fight security threats, terrorists, counterintelligence, spy threats. And they took those tools and they turned them against the American people to hamper a president that the American people had chosen to elect in 2016, to violate the civil liberties of many innocent Americans. Mike Flynn, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, many others that follow from them.
While a few were the lead perpetrators, there was a wall of silence that enabled this to go on. There were not people coming out of the woodwork at the time saying, “I object to this.” A few. We just learned of one who in 2019, when I file a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, discovers that they’ve used the Steele dossier for the intelligence assessment, which it was a terrible product. It violated the rules of intelligence to use it to make their conclusions. And they did. He learns about it three years later, he makes a little stink for a few minutes.
But the truth of the matter is there was an institutional silence downstream in many of these cases, which meant hundreds of agents, hundreds of analysts, hundreds of professionals were quiet in the face of this activity. And I think we need to create a culture of enabling people to come forward quicker and faster and to protect them quicker and faster if they do. Because the truth of the matter is, I have found hundreds of people in my reporting now that knew this was going on, but I couldn’t find hundreds of people in 2016 and 2017 willing to come forward and tell us that.
The Bill Priestap Notes: A Moment of Conscience
We learn from Bill Priestap’s famous notes. Bill Priestap was the counterintelligence chief of the FBI, and he’s sort of sandwiched between Andy McCabe, his boss, and Pete Strzok, the main operator on Crossfire Hurricane. And at some point, he realizes that the Obama White House and the FBI and the Justice Department are scheming to continue an investigation of Michael Flynn, who his own team has concluded is innocent, is guilty of no crime, they’ve turned his life upside down.
And on January 4, 2017, the FBI was prepared to close the case and clear Mike Flynn so he could become the National Security Adviser. And then there’s a meeting on January 5, 2017, and activity on January 6, 2017, where the President of the United States, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, the Vice President, Sally Yates, the Deputy Attorney General and others are involved. And the whole purpose of the meeting is to figure out how can we keep investigating Mike Flynn when he’s innocent? And they’re talking about luring him into an interview.
And Bill Priestap goes home and writes a set of notes. “What was our goal today? To get the American people the truth or to try to create a scenario where we lure a man into an interview where we might catch him in a lie?” Those are profound statements to have written down on a document. Rare for an FBI agent to do so. He clearly had a conscientious concern, but he didn’t become a conscientious objector. In fact, John Durham had a hard time getting him to cooperate.
The Lasting Consequences
So when people say, “Wasn’t it just a few that ruined the agencies?” Yeah, definitely, there’s a few that are the major perpetrators. But the cone of silence, the wall of silence that went on over nine years, puts a stain on the entire agencies now. And now there are many efforts. Whistleblowers are coming out now. There are people who are having their security clearances pulled. There are people who have been fired. There are people that will now be summoned before a grand jury.
But nine years of weaponization, nine years of truths have left an indelible consequence. One is the majority of Americans don’t trust their government as much anymore. Two, there are still a subset of Americans that firmly believe, still to this day, in the absence of any provable evidence that Donald Trump was a stooge working for Vladimir Putin and they worked together to steal the 2016 election. There isn’t an iota of evidence.
Those are long-lasting consequences that generations of America after us are going to have to deal with. And the cone of silence allowed that to happen. The perpetrators allowed that to happen. And the utter failure of the government to create meaningful punishments, even when they caught some.
We caught an FBI agent, a lawyer who doctored a document before the FISA court, the most intelligent secret, the only secret intelligence court in America. He doctored it. He admits he doctored it. And he didn’t even get a slap on the wrist. He got a tap on the knuckle.
If I’m a deep state person who has a political motivation, I don’t feel any deterrence right now. I don’t feel any deterrence to not do this again. If my political objectives require me to do that or make me think I should do it, we have to take that temptation away. And we failed to do it. Our generation has failed to do it.
And if we don’t do it soon, future generations will look back at us and say, our generation didn’t answer the call like the greatest generation did in World War II. They didn’t step up and make the hard choices and fight the hard fights. And I think that is the moment upon which we find ourselves in history nine years later. We know a lot more. But we haven’t punished much and we haven’t created future deterrence.
JOHN SOLOMON: Well, if I may, you know, I…
The Diplomatic Consequences
JAN JEKIELEK: I remember when this intelligence community assessment came out back in the day, one of the effects was the expulsion of all sorts of Russian diplomats.
JOHN SOLOMON: Yeah, right.
JAN JEKIELEK: Pretty significant given the recent meetings as we’re recording, given some of the recent meetings that the President has had with Vladimir Putin himself, with Zelensky and European leaders. Kind of highly relevant to how relations with Russia shaped up subsequent to all this.
The Obama-Biden Russia Reset and Its Consequences
JOHN SOLOMON: There’s a direct line to the fall of 2009 and what has happened ever since then. In the summer and fall of 2009, the Obama Biden Clinton foreign policy team decided they were going to reset relations with Russia and that they could cajole their way into Vladimir Putin’s heart. And if we gave him lots of goodies, he would just become a good actor.
And for three or four years, both sides got goodies. Vladimir Putin got uranium one assets under our soil. He got decades of contracts that made American utilities reliant on Russian nuclear fuel. We were so reliant that when Joe Biden wanted to sanction Russia for its second incursion into Ukraine a few years ago, he couldn’t sanction Russia’s uranium because he would have taken our power plants out.
They made all these concessions to Vladimir Putin and then when Vladimir Putin got everything he wanted, he pulled the rug out from under them and he invaded Crimea the first time in 2014. That led to an enormous moment of embarrassment for three people who thought they knew foreign policy pretty well.
The Clinton Campaign’s Strategic Response
And there’s a moment in the fall of 2015 where Hillary Clinton, now the assumptive nominee for the Democratic Party, does a poll. It’s in my book and we actually have a copy and we’ve interviewed the Clinton people and that poll was of all the scandals that Hillary Clinton and her husband went through which of those scandals were most going to be an impediment to the American people in saying, “Yes, I want Hillary Clinton to be president?”
And the internal team were convinced it was going to be the email scandal. But the poll came back showing that the real impediment, the number one reason that Americans might not elect Hillary Clinton is they thought somehow she and her husband were corrupt because they’d taken all this money from Russia through their Clinton Foundation.
And the poll came back and they were shocked. And Clinton campaign officials told me flatly they decided at that moment, no matter who the Republican nominee was going to be, they needed to neutralize the Russia issue. And they begin their research in December 15th. That Russia research eventually becomes the Steele dossier and the Alexander Downer revelation from Australia, which are all orchestrated to create the false Russian narrative.
Intelligence Community Involvement
And we now know that not only was that a politically motivated effort funded by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee through their law firm, the CIA and the FBI assisted that plot to be carried out, that dirty trick to be carried out. And they did so after the top leaders of the country were briefed. So they don’t stop it.
That hampers the entire first few years of President Trump’s ability to deal with the number one nuclear superpower in the world besides US And China. We’ll never know what history was stolen from us, what opportunities, diplomatically were stolen from us, what security opportunities were thwarted because this dirty trick was allowed to extend so far.
The Continuing Consequences
But you go into the second iteration of Obama’s tenure, the Joe Biden presidency, a continuation of policies of Obama after a brief interruption of the first Trump administration. And you see, the Democrats must isolate Russia because they’ve made them this mortal enemy in many ways through a dirty trick, a political illusion.
And we have a second incursion of Ukraine, which is far more deadly than the first. On Barack Obama’s watch, we know there’s more than a million lives lost on both sides and maybe a lot more. We don’t have full numbers yet.
And Vladimir Putin comes to the United States for his bilateral discussion with President Trump earlier this month. And he said something that I think may be the most profound thing of all. “I wouldn’t have invaded if President Trump was president.” And people say, “Ah, it’s just propaganda,” but I don’t think it is propaganda.
History has shown that Donald Trump did engage Putin in 16, he did engage him in 25. And Joe Biden and Barack Obama didn’t effectively engage him after they got burned by their reset. I think that 18 year history, 17 year history is the price we paid. The world could have been very different. Lives could have been saved, money could have been saved, terror attacks could have been stopped. It is a much more consequential scandal than just a little bit of politics and classic Washington gotcha.
JAN JEKIELEK: I think we should kind of give an overview of what this whole scandal is because ultimately you and I, we’ve been covering this for a long time, but there’s a whole lot of people out there, even people who kind of believe that there was a scandal and so forth, that just don’t understand the dimensions and it is actually pretty darn.
JOHN SOLOMON: Complicated that have been part of the goal to make it so complicated it’d be hard to unravel.
JAN JEKIELEK: Right, right, right. So what actually happened here?
The Scandal in Simple Terms
JOHN SOLOMON: So in layman’s terms, if we’re sitting at a bar talking to someone after the whistle blew at the factory at 4:30 in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Hillary Clinton invented a scandal that she would posit on Donald Trump. That Donald Trump would be made to look like he was a stooge of Vladimir Putin and trying to conspire with Vladimir Putin to steal the 2016 election. And then she would distribute it to the FBI and the media and try to dirty up Donald Trump and win the election and become the natural heir to the Barack Obama era.
It didn’t quite work. The FBI did open up an investigation after being warned that Hillary Clinton was going to do this dirty trick. That investigation is called Crossfire Hurricane men. To carry out that investigation, they used the most awesome powers of the intelligence community, including these all intrusive surveillance warrants called FISA warrants, which means they can look at every part of your life and you’ll never know it. They could break into your house, they can listen to your phone calls, they can get your email.
And they did that to several Trump associates and probably learned a lot about the president himself in the process. In the middle of an election where that president is running to be the successor to oust the Democrats. So the opposition party is being targeted by the ruling party, if we put it into European terms, and in the middle of an election they’re investigating their opponent.
The Investigation’s Findings
That investigation yields no evidence of coordination collusion. No, Donald Trump isn’t a stooge. All the FBI people conclude that. But they don’t stop the investigation. They keep turning it and going all the way through the beginning of the Trump presidency, all the way into the middle of the Trump presidency. When Robert Mueller, a special prosecutor, comes out and said, “We didn’t find collusion,” there’s a subsequent further investigation of the investigators that said there never was any iota of evidence to warrant the investigation, that it was a political dirty trick. That is the legacy.
The Pattern of Wash, Rinse, Repeat
And I think there’s a second legacy. All right, so one scandal we made a fake scandal. We drove the American people through. It had vast consequence. But I believe from the evidence that we now have in hand that it is a wash, rinse, repeat, wash, rinse and repeat cycle that went on over the last 10 years. Every time a Democrat had a liability, potentially legal liability, they would foist a fake allegation on the Republicans or a dubious allegation on the Republicans to neutralize their threat.
And I’m going to walk you through three episodes that we’ve all been through. And I think when people step away from it, they realize, “Wait a second, you’re right, those things happen and nothing came of them.”
Episode One: Hillary Clinton’s Scandals
The first is Hillary Clinton has a double scandal at the top of her 2016 election. She has a classified email scandal. She’s wrongly moved classified emails through her server. And then separately, three separate FBI offices in New York, Washington and Little Rock are investigating a pay to pay corruption scheme involving her foundation. And you will soon learn in the next few days that the IRS had a fourth criminal investigation.
So four corruption investigations and one national security investigation, she gets absolved of all of those. All those investigations are shut down. And then Russia collusion becomes the distraction to get the American people to think that Donald Trump has a bigger problem than Hillary Clinton.
Episode Two: Hunter Biden and Ukraine
Let’s fast forward to the spring and summer of 19. Donald Trump’s just been cleared of Russia collusion. Robert Mueller report comes out. I break a set of stories that come directly from FBI files on Hunter Biden’s efforts to make money in Ukraine and possibly use his father’s influence as the chief Ukraine policy architect in the Obama administration to make lots of money, millions from a crooked gas company called Burisma.
And Donald Trump wants to get some information from Ukraine to find out if it’s true. And we turn the Biden corruption scheme into Donald Trump’s impeachment. And in the process of that, legitimate FBI and IRS agents who we now know famously, because I wrote the story of the IRS whistleblowers, they’re thwarted from pursuing justice against Hunter Biden. So Hillary gets out of her two investigations. Donald Trump goes through a painful one. Hunter has real liabilities. Donald Trump goes to a painful impeachment.
Episode Three: The Classified Documents
I’ll take you through one third, because I think this is the third of the wash, rinse, repeat cycles. In two or three months into the Biden presidency, Joe Biden’s aides learned that he moved classified documents to his office at the UPenn in Washington, where he did some work, and into his garage, famously next to his car in Delaware. They know that this could be a potentially damaging scandal for the president.
Within a few weeks of that, the Biden White House instructs the National Archives to sic the FBI on Donald Trump to see if he has classified documents and to raid his home and to create a scandal. Now, what makes that most remarkable is that President Trump had far greater legal authorities to declassify and take information from him than Joe Biden did. Because Joe Biden’s vice president, he’s not a fully, fully declassifying authority. And some of the things he took came from the Senate. Much more legal liability.
Once again, Donald Trump’s home is raided. Donald Trump looks to be the secret leaker. And then, “Oh, finally, the Biden people. Oh, we forgot to tell you that Joe Biden had these documents as well.”
The Current Investigation
I think right now, the current FBI director, Kash Patel, the current Attorney General, Pam Bondi, the current chief prosecutor for government weapons immunization crimes, are all looking at this as one ongoing conspiracy. Repeatedly protect the Democrats and obstruct investigations of Democrats for potential unlawful activity, and repeatedly violate the civil liberties of Republicans to try to create an alternate scandal to keep people off the scent or trail of their own problems.
And in the course of that, the American people are repeatedly deceived. The American people’s will as expressed in elections, are overturned or thwarted. And I think that right now, the boomerang to this is that this era of people, all these characters that we’ve been mentioning, they may be looked at like the mob was looked at as someone who was carrying out a conspiracy. And they may be charged with a conspiracy and may not be charged at all.
But it is ironic that right now we just announced that the Justice Department is going to use a tool that we used to only reserve for mob families and drug cartels. They’re called strike forces. And we’re turned that against to investigate the behavior of the Obama administration and its successors and its allies. That’s the moment we’re living in right now.
Nobody knows whether charges will be brought, whether really crimes were committed yet. But now the current ruling party is going to look back at its opposition party for what it did and how we resolve this, I think will have a profound effect on the American experience and a profound effect on what sort of country, what sort of trust we’re going to have in government when we resolve it.
JAN JEKIELEK: How have you been personally affected by all of this?
The Personal Cost and Rewards of Independent Journalism
JOHN SOLOMON: I don’t find any personal consequence to me. I’ve done in this episode of my journalism career what I did in the 80s and 90s and the early 2000s when I won lots of awards in the traditional media. I was the lead investigative reporter for AP. I broke the FBI lab scandal and broke a lot of the stories of wrongdoing inside the Oklahoma City FBI investigation. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols clearly guilty, but there was some wrongdoing to maybe hide other participants in that by the government.
In 9/11, the day after we were struck and Condi Rice got on the podium as the National Security Advisor and said “no one could ever imagined flying planes, terrorists would fly planes into our buildings.” I said, that’s just not true. And I went back and chronicled all the failures of the FBI. They had all the pieces of the plot right in front of them including a decade of warnings that terrorists wanted to fly buildings or fly planes into buildings as weapons. And I unraveled the really unholy story of the FBI’s incredible intelligence failures. Much of my work is cited in the 9/11 Commission’s report.
And I continued to do that during the ’07 campaign. As the lead investigative reporter for the Washington Post, I highlighted how John McCain had a really troubling relationship with a banned Russian oligarch in America named Oleg Deripaska. Becomes very famous in ’16 with Donald Trump, but he was famous in ’08 for the work I did at the Washington Post and many other stories I did.
I have always looked to tell Americans the stories that they weren’t being told or that they felt like they needed to get the facts to make a better decision than the official narrative in Washington. And in ’16 and ’17 that meant challenging when I was being told that the Russia collusion investigation was bogus.
The Hunter Biden Investigation and Professional Backlash
And then I began to choose. I chose because the same FBI sources that helped me understand that Russia collusion was a bogus investigation and a dirty trick told me that there was a major Hunter Biden Joe Biden scandal was being suppressed. And I wrote the original stories at the Hill that laid out way before we knew there was a laptop. In fact, my stories led to the subpoenas that secured the laptop.
But that story caused my own profession to turn against me. And so I decided I want to keep doing what I’m doing. So I just want to start up my own company. And I do today what I did in 1992 when I dug up Ross Perot’s secret history with Richard Nixon and change the course of the ’92 election by forcing Ross Perot to temporarily drop out as a third party candidate.
I’ve always done the same thing. I don’t know whether the profession I was in for most of that career does the same thing today. They certainly don’t consider me to be part of their work. And quite frankly, I don’t admire their work as much as I used to. But I keep doing what I do. I still have the ability to inform millions of Americans.
Transparency in Reporting
And to me it’s an honor and a pleasure to just go out and tell stories that other Americans have. I don’t need an award, a Pulitzer or anything. The greatest reward I have is being able to talk to our readers and our listeners and our viewers every day and try to tell them something that they don’t know and also give them the opportunity to challenge it.
One of the things I’ve made a hallmark of my reporting is to put all my reporting materials in the story. I am not arrogant enough to suggest to any American, “you should just trust me because I’m John Solomon.” I want you to trust me because here’s what I have and I want you to see it. And so at Just the News we created the dig-in tool and all of our reporters’ assets are in the story. I think that’s transparent and to me it’s the greatest reward.
My career has given me the chance to keep doing that. Now as I head into my 38th year as a journalist, I haven’t been negatively affected by any of this other than surprised to see how few news organizations in the last decade covered things that they almost certainly would have covered with greater vigor two or three generations ago.
The Decline of Traditional Media
Jeff Gerth is a close friend of mine, two-time Pulitzer winner at the New York Times. He beat my butt as a young AP reporter at the New York Times on Whitewater. He did a great job. The New York Times cared in the 1990s that a Democratic president might have been involved in corruption. They intentionally, four decades later, tried to hide from the American public that a Democratic president was potentially corrupt in Joe Biden and Hunter Biden. I don’t know how that happened yet. He wrote a great story in the Columbia Journalism Review.
I worked at the Washington Post that my favorite year in journalism was my one year at the Washington Post. For the first time I had my own byline. I wasn’t just by the Associated Press, which I’d been for 21 years. But the Washington Post wrote stories that I know are factually false. They probably knew were factually false when they published them, had to know because I know they talked to the same people I talked to.
So seeing that that happened, the American experience tells us, like Epoch did, that you go out and you create competition. The way you fix problems like this is not to whine in the darkness. Go create a competition and do it better and see if people come read you. And I think that’s been the greatest blessing that’s ever happened to me. Getting shunned in the fall of ’19, being tarnished in the Ukraine impeachment scandal and then being able to come back and say I was right and here’s why has been just a great journey for me.
The Mysterious Late-Night Encounter
I do remember two people. And when you talk about the larger government, there were a few people that had consciences that were trying to get there. And perhaps the most profound moment of the last decade of my career occurred in March of ’17. I had just done a story that got Sean Hannity’s attention. So I was on Fox News. It was about a rapid rise in unmaskings where Americans’ intelligence is looked at even though there’s no warrant. They unmask your name and they know what you someone overseas and they don’t get a warrant for it. And it had gone up like 200, 300% in the last year of Barack Obama, which is very odd. It was odd to the FISA court. That’s why they put the data out. They were concerned that this was a trend. I just thought it was a good civil liberty story. So I wrote it.
And at that point I had been repeatedly told that “don’t waste your time on Russia collusion. It’s going nowhere.” And by the way, from some of the most senior leaders of the FBI and the Justice Department, the very people who might also gone out and told us there was something there when there wasn’t. But they were telling me it wasn’t.
Got home about 10:45, 11:00 o’clock at night, my wife’s already in bed. I pull in the driveway and there’s a blue sedan sitting in front of my mailbox with its yellow fog lights on. And I pull in the driveway and these two guys get out of their car. It’s about 11 o’clock at night. And as I’m getting out of my car, say, “Are you Mr. Solomon?” I’m like, “I don’t know. Am I being arrested? What’s going on?” They could throw cops on me. Did I break some classified secret? I shouldn’t.
And “you don’t know who we are. We can’t tell you who we are. But you’re at the tip of a very large iceberg, and we hope you drill into it.” And I’m like, “What in God’s name are you guys talking about?” “Well, that thing you were reporting on television.” “Yeah.” “It’s a FISA court filing. It is the apex of a very large scandal, and you need to drill down on it.”
“All right, walk me through this guy.” “Well, we can’t tell you. It’s all classified.” “Okay, that’s not very helpful. Can you give me something of more generic description?” “Yeah. We work in the Intelligence Community, and our agencies were asked to participate in one of the greatest political dirty tricks in history. And if it isn’t stopped, and one day, when it is uncovered, we will lose the tools that keep you and I safe at night. We won’t be able to find terrorists and we won’t find spies, because these tools will be taken from us because we abused them in the last couple years.”
And like, “Holy mackerel, what’s going on here?” And so they couldn’t give me much more detail, but they inspired me to start wondering about whether I was missing something big.
The Investigation Begins
And I got home by that time in there, 20 minutes depends about 11:20 at night. From 11:20 at night to 2 in the morning, I wrote a long email to my then work sister, Sarah Carter, who was just a fantastic reporter. Now she works for President Trump. And I just tried to remember everything they told me. Like, “Sarah, I don’t know what the hell these guys are trying to tell us, but tomorrow morning, let’s wake up and find out.” And that sent us on our journey.
And there are moments where you get old enough now, like, do I still want to keep doing this? I could go get a cushy job or write books or just do a podcast and retire. And I remember those two guys, and I still don’t know their names, I don’t know their agency, but if they cared enough to have me dig, I feel like maybe I should spend a little bit more time digging before I hang my spurs up.
And I think that there are a lot more people like that about to come out of the woodwork and tell us things that we just needed to know that we haven’t been told the last decade. And that’s why what you’ve done at Epoch and NTD and all these places, we’ve created a place for them to come because they’ve been shunned in the places where they used to go. They get shunned at the Washington Post and NBC News and the New York Times.
And what we’ve done is we’ve created a home for new whistleblowers to come and to legitimately get facts out. And I feel like being part of that, just a tiny little part of that, you’re a tiny little part of that may be one of the greatest gifts we can give back to future generations. So it’s a pretty fun thing to be able to do every day. It is.
JAN JEKIELEK: I remember when you told me that story. It feels like a lifetime ago.
The Stakes for Western Civilization
JOHN SOLOMON: Probably was the first time I told you, yeah, they turned out to be right. In fact, it’s probably worse than what they told me that night. I think we now see a much worse perversion of things.
You look at what Tulsi Gabbard recently declassified and we’re willing to take an official intelligence product sanctioned by the President and turn it into a falsehood. We’re willing to have a deputy, or we did have a deputy attorney general if the evidence is right, who told FBI investigators who had predicated criminal investigations shut it down.
Beyond the political dirty trick that those two gentlemen were worried about and came to me that night, we’ve created a two tiered system of justice. Democrats and Republicans are being, or liberals and conservatives, whatever you want to call these people. They’re treated differently in the eyes and the tools of the law and the intelligence community.
And that is anathema to everything our founding fathers on that painting up there intended in our country. They wanted justice to be truly blind. And today justice has rose colored or red fired glasses on, depending on who you are.
And that leaves us hanging over the abyss of what I think is not only the end of the American experience if we don’t fix it, it’s the beginning of the end of the Western civilization as we know it, the law and order civilization that has dominated the last two millennia.
The Global Implications
If we want to ask ourselves, “What’s the danger here? If we just roll over and say, ah, it’s too late, let’s not go settle old bygones or investigate this further, we kind of know what happened,” I think the answer is, look what’s happening in England and the United Kingdom right now where people now get arrested for thought crimes based on who the prevailing party in power is.
Let’s look at what’s sweeping across Europe in terms of the notion that it’s not common sense to secure your borders. It’s not common sense to punish people who commit heinous crimes by keeping in prison. We turn them back out in the street.
I think what we answer, our answer to what we now know to be the scandal, the controversy, the failures, the abuses of the last decade is if we don’t get this right, the law and order civilization that has governed most of the freedoms and most of the experience of the Western world is in grave jeopardy.
I was just at an event where Scott Jennings talked, a great CNN analyst and always fun to watch on TV and a great battler. But he said it more profoundly than I could. But the next couple years of American history will define what sort of Western civilization the world’s going to be. Are we going to speak Mandarin someday because China eats our lunch? Are we going to eliminate the most fundamental truth?
The War on Truth
You know, I said this in a speech the other day, and I really believe this. What we’ve been through in the last decade, beyond all the specifics we just walked through, there’s been a war on truth. We’ve been told not to believe things that our eyes told us. We’ve been told to believe things that evidence told us not to believe.
We had a chairman of the House Intelligence Committee tell us there’s Russia collusion, “if you’re willing to see it.” What does that mean? Either there is or there isn’t. It isn’t about a willingness to see it. That’s the proof. That’s what Adam Schiff told us. We are in a war on truth.
And if those, if the truths of this moment are eviscerated, if we can convince a future generation that there’s no difference between a man and a woman and a man can have a period and give a baby and compete in women’s sports, if we’re told that Donald Trump was a steward of Russia, which people still believe in, though there’s no evidence of it, the ultimate opportunity for those who hate this country and hate the liberties upon which this country rests, they’ll get rid of the ultimate truth that is at the American experience.
And that is that we’ve been endowed by our creator with inalienable rights of freedom. And I see in Western Europe right now an effort to eviscerate those freedoms. And if this war on truth prevails in this country, the final truth that will be rolled back is that we no longer have those inalienable rights. They weren’t endowed by a creator. Maybe there isn’t a creator. Our government will tell us that’s how profound the moment we’re in.
Our Generation’s Responsibility
And we’re not answering the call that the greatest generation did. They put their lives on the line in Europe and died in a foreign place, in a cold slopey hill or on an Omaha beach. But our generation has to be willing to preserve the truth that we are granted by our maker inalienable rights of freedom and liberty, starting with speech.
And if we don’t fight hard enough for it, we will be looked upon as the first generation to hand a worse American experience off to our successors than every prior generation. And I hope people have that urgency. I don’t think many people think about what we’re talking about in those terms. But that is the scale of responsibility I think our generation faces.
JAN JEKIELEK: Well, John, I think this is an apt place to finish up a final quick thought.
The Path Forward
JOHN SOLOMON: Everybody who’s watching this show today, everybody who reads Epoch Times regularly or just the news, everybody that shares truth with a neighbor and a friend is I think being a part of the solution that we need to do. We need to get the facts out, make a great assessment, fix what’s wrong and do that.
There’s some big announcements coming up. The intelligence community will get shrunk down. The FBI will get reformed. Maybe some people will get prosecuted and punished for past abuses. But at the end of the day, the thing that will be most powerful to the solution is the ability of everyone in this country to stand up and hand the American experience and the liberties that have gone with it to a new generation unfettered and undamaged from the experience of the last 10 years.
If we hand off a few less liberties in the next few years, we’ll have failed. And I hope that everyone who watches this show does it for a reason. They know they’re getting truth. And so they know when they go to the Epoch Times they get truth. And they know when they go to other places they’re getting truth. I hope they take those truths and make sure that we pull the American experience into another generation in the same general shape that we got it when we became the ruling class of America.
JAN JEKIELEK: Well, John Solomon, it’s such a pleasure to have had you on.
JOHN SOLOMON: Great to be here. Thanks, Jan.
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