Investigative journalist John Solomon says a 2015 Clinton campaign poll on the Uranium One scandal set off a decade of Democrat-led probes against Donald Trump, starting with Russia collusion.
On the latest episode of “Pod Force One,” veteran journalist John Solomon described how Hillary Clinton’s team moved to neutralize her own Russia-linked baggage in the 2016 race and, in his account, helped launch the FBI’s Trump-Russia collusion investigation.
Solomon, founder of Just the News and head of a Trump administration task force on government transparency, told host and Post columnist Miranda Devine the story did not begin with Donald Trump. It began with a Clinton-world poll.
The New York Post aired his account of a “wash, rinse, repeat cycle” of federal investigations that he said has now stretched across a decade of American politics.
Solomon placed the origins in the November and December 2015 timeframe. Hillary Clinton’s side, he said, polled the scandals hanging over the Clinton world and found one problem towered over the rest.
That problem was Uranium One and the family’s relationship with Russia. Solomon pointed to a $500,000 fee Bill Clinton received from Moscow for a speech at a time when Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, was tied to decisions that included Russian interests gaining access to American uranium through the Uranium One deal, along with utility contracts.
"The origins of that wash, rinse, repeat cycle are in the November/December 2015 timeframe. It’s around that time... that Hillary Clinton does a poll and it takes all the scandals that have been in the Clinton world. The one they’re most concerned about is Uranium One and the Clinton family’s relationship with Russia."
Solomon said the Clintons found that scandal would be the largest impediment to her election. The response, in his telling, was not to clear the air. It was to move the Russia cloud onto the other party.
"It’s at that point they decide to hang a Russian shingle on Donald Trump’s campaign house. They need to project their sins on Donald Trump, or whoever the Republican nominee is going to be... hang a fake Russian scandal on the Republicans to neutralize Hillary Clinton’s campaign."
By April 2016, Perkins Coie, the law firm representing Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, retained the intelligence firm Fusion GPS to run opposition research on Trump.
Fusion GPS hired former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele to dig into Trump’s overseas business relationships. That work produced the Steele dossier, which Solomon described as now-debunked.
In September 2016, former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann went to the FBI with computer data that purportedly linked Trump and the Kremlin-linked Alfa Bank. Solomon said that data has since been debunked as well.
From there, Solomon said, the FBI opened its investigation into what became known as Russia collusion.
"And then the FBI begins its investigation into the insanity of what we now know as Russia collusion, which a lot of people would say is Russia delusion, basically consumes two and a half years of America’s political conscience."
Solomon did not treat the episode as a freelanced dirty trick that stayed in a campaign war room. He said the Obama administration knew what was underway.
He said officials were fully aware of the plan to foment a fake scandal against Trump, that President Barack Obama was briefed, and that nobody stopped it.
"They know about it. Even briefed the President of the United States, Barack Obama, at the time, and nobody stops it."
That claim sits at the center of his larger argument: a Democrat-led pattern that starts with a political weakness, projects it onto a Republican target, and then runs it through federal investigative machinery until the country is forced to live with the fallout for years.
In Solomon’s timeline, the pieces stack in order. Late 2015 polling flags Uranium One. April 2016 brings Fusion GPS onto the payroll through Clinton’s campaign counsel. Steele is hired to mine overseas dirt. September 2016 brings Sussmann to the FBI with the Alfa Bank material. The Russia collusion probe follows and, in his words, eats two and a half years of the country’s political attention.
He framed the whole arc as the opening move in a longer cycle of investigations aimed at Trump, a cycle he said is still defining national politics a decade on.
Voters never got a clean fight over Uranium One on the terms Clinton’s own polling flagged. They got years of Russia collusion theater built on work Solomon says has not held up, and a political class that treated the machine as normal.
