9 Years Later, Here’s What We Know About the Origins of the Russia Probe | John Solomon

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] In this episode, I’m sitting down with award-winning investigative journalist John Solomon, founder and editor-in-chief of Just the News, for a deep dive into what we now know—nine years later—about the origins of the Russia collusion probe.

How did these events change America?

“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,” Solomon says.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:

John Solomon, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

John Solomon:

Yes, good to join you, Jan.

Mr. 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. It was. I remember you were one of the few. A handful of us, yes. Lee Smith with his famous, The Plot Against the President. The little corner of Twitter, if you recall, we pulled some people into our ranks, Jeff Carlson, Hans Manke among them. I’m just thinking off the top of my head of some people who did amazing work on all this stuff.

Mr. Solomon:

Yes, the Federalist did some good work, and Sarah Carter. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Absolutely, Sarah Carter, Molly Hemingway, and the whole Federalist gang. But the bottom line is where we stand today. Did Russia actually interfere in the election in 2016? 

Mr. 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, and 2000. 

It wasn’t 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. And 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 and all of the, I’m a liberal, I believe this, I’m a conservative, I believe this, is that after the election, the best and smartest people we have that watch Russia for a living in the Intelligence Committee decided that Vladimir Putin did not interfere in the election in trying to help one candidate or the other. He didn’t have an impact. He didn’t penetrate the election systems of America. And the reason they were so certain of it is what happened in the final month of the election.

Most Americans make their minds up in October before an election season. About 60 percent of Americans make up their minds 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, and 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’d 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 it. 

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 you 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 suggested it shouldn’t be.

That is the precipice upon which we’ve never passed before. We haven’t crashed 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 it 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 were 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 [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] 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 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.

Mr. 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, I think efforts are happening as we speak at some kind of reform. There have been people that have lost their clearances. Is it reasonable to just say the FBI, the CIA, whatever, the intelligence community, just as a kind of always pejorative?

Mr. 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, and 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, and many others that followed from them. 

While a few were the lead perpetrators, there was a wall of silence that enabled this to go on. There were no people coming out of the woodwork at the time saying, I object to this. There were a few. We just learned of one who in 2019, when I filed a Freedom of Information Act [FOIA] lawsuit, discovered that they’ve used the Steele dossier for the intelligence assessment, which 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. 

What we learned from Bill Priestap’s famous notes, Bill Priestap was the counterintelligence chief for the FBI. And he sort of sandwiched between Andy McCabe, his boss, and Peter 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 guilty of no crime. They’ve turned his life upside down. 

And on January 4th, 2017, the FBI was prepared to close the case and clear Mike Flynn so he could become the national security advisor. And then there’s a meeting on January 5th, 2017, and an activity on January 6th, 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 we can 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. 

So when people say, wasn’t it just a few that ruined the agencies? Yes, definitely, there are a few of 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 mistruths 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 Americans 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 someone. 

We caught an FBI agent, a lawyer, who doctored a document before the FISA court, the only secret intelligence court in America. He doctored it. 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 that is the moment upon which we find ourselves in history. Nine years later, all right, we know a lot more, but we haven’t punished much, and we haven’t created a future that turns.

Mr. 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. 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, highly relevant to how relations with Russia shaped up subsequent to all this?

Mr. 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 for the first time in 2014. That led to an enormous moment of embarrassment for three people who thought they knew foreign policy pretty well. 

And there’s a moment in the fall of 2015 where Hillary Clinton, now the presumptive nominee for the Democratic Party, does a poll in my book. And we actually have a copy of it. 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 was convinced it was going to be an 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 and through Russian sympathizers 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 began their research in December of 2015. That Russia research eventually becomes the Steele dossier and the Alexander Downer revelation from Australia, which are all orchestrated to create the false Russia narrative. 

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 in 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.

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 came 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 2016. He did engage him in 2025. And Joe Biden and Barack Obama didn’t effectively engage him after they got burned by their reset. I think that 18-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.

Mr. Jekielek:

I think we should kind of give an overview of what this whole scandal is because ultimately, like 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 complicated.

Mr. Solomon:

Might have been part of the goal to make it so complicated. It’d be hard to unravel, right?

Mr. Jekielek:

Right. So what actually happened here?

Mr. 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 pm 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. 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 can 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. That investigation yields no evidence of coordination or 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 a Trump presidency, all the way into the middle of the Trump presidency when Robert Mueller, a special prosecutor, comes out and says, 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. And I think there’s a second legacy. So one scandal, we made a fake scandal. We drove the American people through it. It had vast consequences. But I believe from the evidence that we now have in hand, that it is a wash, rinse, 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 happened and nothing came of them. 

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-play 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 a distraction to get the American people to think that Donald Trump has a bigger problem than Hillary Clinton. 

Let’s fast forward to the spring and summer of 2019. Donald Trump’s just been cleared of Russia collusion. Robert Mueller’s 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, are 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 through a painful impeachment. 

I’ll take you through one third because I think this is the third of the wash, rinse, repeat scandals. In two or three months into the Biden presidency, Joe Biden’s aides learned that he moved classified documents to his office at 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 instructed the National Archives to sick 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 authority to declassify and take information from him than Joe Biden did, because Joe Biden was vice president; he’s not a fully declassifying authority. And some of the things he took came from the Senate, a much more legal liability. Once again, Donald Trump’s home is raided. Donald Trump looks to be the secret leaker. 

And then finally, the Biden people say, oh, we forgot to tell you that Joe Biden had these documents as well. I think right now, the current FBI Director Kash Patel, the current Attorney General Pam Bondi, and the current Chief Prosecutor for Government Weaponization 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, is 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, 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, or 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 turn 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 real 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.

Mr. Jekielek:

Have you been personally affected by all of this?

Mr. 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 1980s and 1990s 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. 

On 9/11, the day after we were struck, Condi Rice got on the podium as the national security advisor and said no one could ever envision 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 and fly planes into buildings as weapons. And I unraveled the really unholy story of the FBI’s incredible intelligence failure, as much of my work is cited in the 9/11 Commission’s report. 

And I continued to do that during the 2007 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. He became very famous in 2016 with Donald Trump, but he was famous in 2008 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 I felt like they needed to get the facts to make a better decision than the official narrative in Washington. And in 2016 and 2017, that meant challenging what I was being told that the Russia collusion investigation was bogus. And I’ll tell you an anecdote in a second.You probably remember this because we’ve talked about it in private, but I’ll tell it publicly in a second. 

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 that 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 changed the course of the 1992 election by forcing Ross Perot to temporarily drop out as the third-party candidate. I’ve always done the same thing. I don’t know whether the preparation 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. 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. At Just the News, we created a dig-in tool and all of our reporters’ assets are in the story. I think that’s transparent. And to me, it’s the perception of whether you see it or not. 

It’s either true or false, and we need to get back to that fundamental notion of truth. The greatest reward my career has given me is 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 being 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. 

Jeff Gerth is a close friend of mine, a 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. I don’t. He wrote a great story in the Columbia Journalism Review. I worked at The Washington Post. 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 had been for 21 years. 

But The Washington Post wrote stories that I know are factually false. They probably knew they were factually false when they published them. They 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 The Epoch Times did, that you go out and 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 to read you. 

And I think that’s been the greatest blessing that’s ever happened to me, getting shunned in the fall of 2019, 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. I do remember two people. And, you know, when you talk about the larger government, there were a few people that had consciences that were trying to get there. 

Perhaps the most profound moment of the last decade of my career occurred in March of 2017. 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 said to someone overseas, and they don’t get a warrant for it. It had gone up like two or three hundred percent 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 is a trend. I just thought it was a good civil liberty story, so I wrote it. 

At that point, I had been repeatedly told, 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 have gone out and told us there was something there when there wasn’t. But they were telling me it wasn’t. 

I got home at about 11 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. I pull in the driveway, and these two GI men get out of their car. It’s about 11 o’clock at night. As I’m getting out of my car, I say, are you Mr. Solomon? I’m like, I don’t know. Am I being arrested? What’s going on? Did they throw cuffs on me? Did I break some classified secret I shouldn’t have today? 

They’re like, 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. I’m like, what in God’s name are you guys talking about? Well, that thing you were reporting on television, yes, it’s a FISA court filing. It is the apex of a very large scandal, and you need to drill down into it. I said, all right, walk me through this. They said, well, we can’t tell you; it’s all classified. 

Okay, that’s not very helpful. Can you give me a more generic description? Yes, we work in the intelligence community, and our agencies were asked to participate in one of the greatest political dirty tricks in history. If it isn’t stopped, one day when it is uncovered, we will lose the tools that keep you and me 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 of years. I’m like, holy mackerel, what’s going on here? They couldn’t give me much more detail, but they inspired me to start wondering about whether I was missing something big. 

I got home and by that time, it was about 11:20 at night. From 11:20 pm at night to 2 am in the morning, I wrote a long email to my then work sister, Sarah Carter, who was just a fantastic reporter, now the drug czar for President Trump. I just tried to remember everything they told me.  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. That sent us on our journey, and there are moments where you get old enough now like I still want to keep doing this.

I could go get a cushy job or write books or just do a podcast and retire. 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. 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 in the last decade. 

That’s why what you’ve done at The Epoch Times 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, NBC News, and The New York Times. What we’ve done is created a home for new whistleblowers to come and legitimately get facts out. 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.

Mr. Jekielek:

I remember when you told me that story. It feels like a lifetime ago.

Mr. Solomon:

It probably was the first time I told it. 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 treated differently in the eyes and the tools of the law and the intelligence community. That is anathema to everything our founding fathers and that painting up there intended in our country. They wanted justice to be truly blind. 

Today, justice has rose-colored or red-tinted glasses on, depending on who you are. 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 Western civilization as we know it, the law and order civilization that has dominated the last two millennia. 

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 settle old bygones, or why investigate this further? We kind of know what happened. I think the answer is, look at 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 them in prison. We turn them back out on the street. I think our answer to what we now know to be the scandal, the controversy, the failures, and 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 experiences of the Western world is in grave jeopardy. 

I was just at an event where the great CNN analyst Scott Jennings talked. He is always fun to watch on TV and a great battler, but he said it more profoundly than I could. The next couple of years of American history will define what sort of Western civilization the world is going to be. Are we going to speak Mandarin someday because China eats our lunch? Are we going to eliminate the most fundamental truth? 

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 the perception of whether you see it or not. It’s either true or false, and we need to get back to that fundamental notion of truth. A willingness to see it. It is just a proof. That’s what Adam Schiff told us. We are in a war on truth. And 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. 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 on a cold, sloping hill or on 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.

Mr. Jekielek:

John, a final thought as we finish up?

Mr. Solomon:

Everybody who’s watching this show today, everybody who reads The Epoch Times or Just the News regularly, everybody that shares the 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 the truth. And they know when they go to The Epoch Times, they get the truth. And they know when they go to other places, they’re getting the 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. 

Mr. Jekielek:

John Solomon, it’s a pleasure to have you on the show.

Mr. Solomon:

Great to be here. Thanks, Jan. 

This interview was partially edited for clarity and brevity.