Trumpster File: John SOLOMON

[Kid Berwyn]

9. Professional Propagandist sounds like a career field that's trending upward.

Look at Solomon’s friends:

Trump's Ukraine scandal is a Fox News story

Fox helped get Trump into this mess, and it's the key to getting him out of it

WRITTEN BY MATT GERTZ
PUBLISHED 11/13/19 8:05 AM EST

EXCERPT...

Fox supercharged Giuliani’s disinformation campaign

Giuliani, with the president’s approval, developed a shadow foreign policy campaign in Ukraine, working with corrupt officials to dig up dirt on Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, undermine the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election, and remove U.S. and Ukrainian players that posed obstacles to that effort. That disinformation campaign played out on Fox.

Giuliani filtered the results of his investigation through John Solomon, a conservative writer with a long record of serving as a mouthpiece for right-wing opposition research. Solomon would write up aspects of Giuliani’s work in columns for The Hill, then go on Fox, where his scoops were woven into the network’s conspiracy theories. Over a six-month period, Solomon appeared on Fox News or Fox Business at least 72 times; 51 of those appearances were on Hannity’s program. (Solomon’s role as a Giuliani henchman led to him landing a contract as a Fox contributor last month.) As Fox’s feverish coverage of the Bidens crescendoed, Trump and Giuliani both appeared on the network to bolster the smears.

Depositions from witnesses before the impeachment inquiry reveal that top administration figures at the White House and State Department were forced to monitor Fox for clues about the shape of U.S. foreign policy toward Ukraine. George Kent, a State Department official with oversight over the country, reported tracking extensive coverage from Hannity and Fox host Laura Ingraham. Fiona Hill, a former National Security Council official, testified that she and then-national security adviser John Bolton both regularly tuned in to Fox to keep abreast of Giuliani’s antics, adding that the network’s coverage began to “have an impact obviously on our work.”

Notably, Kent and former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch each testified to an effort by the State Department to contact Hannity in order to thwart what Kent termed a “campaign of slander” against the ambassador. Yovanovitch had apparently become a thorn to Giuliani’s effort to conduct a shadow foreign policy, and so he promoted lies about her that made their way into Solomon’s columns and then onto Fox’s airwaves.

Joseph diGenova, a frequent Fox guest who is Solomon’s lawyer, argued in March on Hannity’s program that Yovanovitch “needs to be called home to the United States for consultation” in order to “answer a slew of questions about her conduct and her assault on the president of the United States.”

According to Kent, State Department counselor Ulrich Brechbuhl subsequently “reached out and suggested to Mr. Hannity that if there was no proof of the allegations, that he should stop covering them.” (Hannity has since denied that State contacted him about Yovanovitch.) In any case, Giuliani’s smear campaign apparently had its intended effect, as Yovanovitch was recalled from her post in May.

SOURCE: https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/trumps-ukraine-scandal-fox-news-story

A Machine of Lies.