Got Paranoia? Giuliani and John Solomon

Emperor Calus of the Cabal Empire, via Destinypedia.

A detail brought up by emptywheel the other day caught my attention, on the subject of the SDNY investigation of Rudolph Giuliani's activities in Ukraine: when Giuliani was supposedly working with the prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko on a list of imaginary crimes committed by Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, and other Americans regarded as Trump enemies (allegations Lutsenko now denies he ever made), the procedure he followed, as reported in The Times:

Mr. Lutsenko initially asked Mr. Giuliani to represent him, according to the former mayor, who said he declined because it would have posed a conflict with his work for the president. Instead, Mr. Giuliani said, he interviewed Mr. Lutsenko for hours, then had one of his employees — a “professional investigator who works for my company” — write memos detailing the Ukrainian prosecutors’ claims about Ms. Yovanovitch, Mr. Biden and others.

Mr. Giuliani said he provided those memos to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo this year and was told that the State Department passed the memos to the F.B.I. He did not say who told him.

Mr. Giuliani said he also gave the memos to the columnist, John Solomon, who worked at the time for The Hill newspaper and published articles and videos critical of Ms. Yovanovitch, the Bidens and other Trump targets. It was unclear to what degree Mr. Giuliani’s memos served as fodder for Mr. Solomon, who independently interviewed Mr. Lutsenko and other sources.

It was that "fodder for Mr. Solomon", an awful purveyor of wingnut conspiracy evidence in the otherwise fairly respectable pages of The Hill (which he recently left to start his own media company and take on a contributor gig at Fox News), from the bogus Uranium One "controversy" in October 2017 to claiming that women accusing Trump of sexual assault were getting payments from interested Democrats, and the defense of Paul Manafort:

On June 19, 2019, The Hill published an opinion piece written by Solomon alleging that the FBI and Robert Mueller disregarded warnings that evidence used against Paul Manafort may have been faked."^[24] His source was Nazar Kholodnytsky, a disgraced Ukrainian prosecutor, and Konstantin Kilimnik, who has been linked to Russian intelligence and who happens to be Paul Manafort's former business partner.^[25]

It also struck the folks at Media Matters, whose version explains what was striking about it:

• In March, Giuliani sent the results of his investigation to the State Department to be investigated and to conservative columnist John Solomon. 
• The same month, Solomon began publishing a series of columns that mirrored the sourcing and claims Giuliani made in his State Department dossier.
• Over the next six months, Solomon published 45 columns aimed at discrediting the Russia investigation, 12 of which focused primarily on Ukraine. 
• During that same time period, Solomon appeared on Fox News or Fox Business at least 72 times. 
• Fifty-one of those appearances were on Hannity, whose host dutifully promoted Solomon’s scoops and wove them into his ever-evolving conspiracy theory that deep state elements in the government have been plotting to overthrow Trump.

Solomon has been a kind of central figure in laundering these stories to make them look like real reporting and getting them out, through The Hill and Fox and other venues, and it looks, as very clearly in the Lutsenko case, like fabricating them.

And how long do you suppose Giuliani has been supplying Solomon with fodder? I can't tell you that, but I can tell that in and around the 2016 presidential campaign, in particular when Solomon was working for the news aggregator website Circa, for which he and some news partners, in particular the remarkable Saudi Arabia–raised Sara A. Carter, produced some original reporting, they had some FBI sources who might well have been related to the reputed rogues of the New York field office, Trumpster ex-agent Jim Kallstrom, and Giuliani, who delivered stories ranging from the completely reputable (as of 8 March 2017 the FBI Russia investigation was focused on Russia and only tangentially on Trump) to the fairly outlandish (as of mid-July 2017 the FBI had made former national security adviser Mike Flynn "the target of FBI revenge for his support in 2014 of a sexual discrimination complaint filed against the brass by supervisory special agent Robyn Gritz" as opposed to, you know, busting him for the crimes to which he pleaded guilty.

And, maybe more to the point, on Hannity, 17 October 2017,

according to news reports tonight from The Hill's John Solomon and Circa News' Sara Carter, there [are] brand-new FBI documents that show the Russian nuclear industry officials kicked back millions and millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation all while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state and helped approve the uranium one deal which gave Moscow, Russia, Vladimir Putin control of 20 percent of American uranium, the foundational materials for nuclear weapons....

And in Townhall 25 January 2018, on Strzok and Page,

I'm concerned that they're still working at the FBI," Carter said. "I'm hearing from my sources, too. FBI agents are saying, 'Why are they still there?'"

"The Lovebirds. They were having an affair, they were both married, they’re working counter-intelligence. That’s enough for blackmail," Carter said. "Now they’re sending text messages on an unsecured phone. Believe me, the Germans, the Russians, the Israelis, everybody is going into those phones and trying to suck out all the information they have."

And Investor's Business Daily 26 April 2018, offering an alternative view on the FBI's attempt to find some kind of corruption in the Clinton Foundation, kind of poignant in view of the way McCabe was ultimately fired,

"Multiple former FBI officials, along with a Congressional official, say that while there may have been internal squabbling over the FBI's investigation into the Clinton Foundation at the time, there was allegedly another 'stand-down' order by McCabe regarding the opening of the investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of her private email for official government business," wrote independent journalist Sarah Carter...

That "stand down" order, a figment of another fabrication from the same factory, made it all the way to the respectable Wall Street Journal:

a narrative that had been developing following the story in the WSJ on October 23, 2016, that questioned McCabe’s impartiality in overseeing FBI investigations involving former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and claimed that McCabe had ordered the termination of the CF Investigation due to Department of Justice pressure

which prompted McCabe to engineer his own leak to WSJ assuring the public that the investigation was ongoing, the leak that was to lead to his firing two years later.

Another leak from that immediate period was this from 2 September 2016, Daily Caller, just a couple of months after FBI director announced that the Hillary Clinton email investigation was finished and Clinton had done nothing wrong, a report disputing that conclusion:

FBI investigators compiled enough evidence during their investigation of Hillary Clinton’s rogue email server to show that the former secretary of state violated federal records-keeping laws.

She was also informed in 2009, her first year in office, that she had an obligation under the Federal Records Act to forward her State Department work emails to the agency’s record preservation system. But, according to the news website Circa, Clinton opted against that option because she wanted control over “sensitive” messages.

Circa’s report comes from former Washington Times veteran reporter John Solomon and is based on unnamed sources familiar with the FBI’s investigation of Clinton. That probe ended in July when the FBI and Justice Department declined to press charges against the Democratic presidential candidate or her aides for their handling of classified information.

This leak (from the New York cabal) or rather pseudo-leak, since the content is pretty much entirely false, followed by the rumors spread about McCabe from 23 October, may have been what frightened Comey to the point where he would preemptively reveal the existence of Huma Abedin's trove of Clinton emails on 28 October (which Circa didn't touch until the 30th, and offering no original reporting at all). The FBI was really under continual attack from opponents of Hillary Clinton from somewhere, and that's the effect it was having, including, certainly, FBI personnel or retired personnel from the New York office; and Solomon's organization was central to moving information from there to the media, laundered through Circa and placed in the Daily Caller or wherever.

As to Giuliani, my discovery about him is that he and John Solomon may have have a very long relationship, starting in 2007, when Solomon, then a respectable Washington Post writer, produced an effusive piece about how rich Giuliani had become out of 9/11—which may sound to you and me like a hit piece, but is really effective promotion for the kind of client he was interested in:

In crafting its image, the firm took care to burnish its most valuable asset: the worldwide reputation Giuliani had earned for his composure and leadership in the days after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. "No client is ever approved or worked on without a full discussion with Rudy," said the firm's senior managing partner, Michael D. Hess, former corporation counsel for the city of New York. Not surprisingly, a firm that markets Giuliani and is run by Giuliani has taken on the characteristics of the politician, who even by New York standards was known for his self-confidence and sometimes defiant insistence on doing things his way. Famously loyal, Giuliani chose as his partners longtime associates, including a former police commissioner later convicted of corruption, a former FBI executive who admitted taking artifacts from Ground Zero and a former Roman Catholic priest accused of covering up sexual abuse in the church....

For many clients, hiring Giuliani delivered the political equivalent of a Good Housekeeping seal. Start-up companies or clients enmeshed in controversy gained instant credibility as well as the potential to access a vast Rolodex of contacts Giuliani and his partners have amassed over the years. "His name brings inherent value," said John Mason, chairman of BioOne Solutions, a Florida decontamination company that merged with Giuliani Partners. "If someone has a need in our area, it's unlikely they wouldn't take his call."

I'm thinking Giuliani probably loved the article, and may have been cultivating Solomon and Solomon's friends ever since, feeding him scoops and introducing him to Jim Kallstrom, and for Solomon to be working on the propaganda being pulled out of Ukraine was just a natural development from there. Giuliani and Solomon fabricated the Lutsenko memos together, or got the servants to do it.