Philip Reeker and Mark Sandy testimony, and John Solomon

Philip Reeker, acting assistant secretary of European and Eurasian Affairs, testified privately last month that a “media storm” of negative but “highly inaccurate” stories targeting Marie Yovanovitch led to her recall from Kyiv in May, even as veteran State officials sought “a formal statement from the department” in her defense.

"There would be no statement," Reeker told investigators, according to a transcript of his testimony released Tuesday by Democrats leading the impeachment inquiry into Trump. "We would continue to use the press guidance that we had that had been cleared."

  The Hill

Mike Pompeo is up to his sweaty palms in this. Nunes and all the Republicans who sat through all those public hearings trashing every witness knew all of this the whole time. No wonder Adam Schiff didn't cut them an inch of slack.

[Reeker's testimony] supported the narrative delivered by a number of other veteran diplomats testifying in the impeachment investigation who have painted a graphic picture of efforts by Trump’s allies — led by his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani — to go after Yovanovitch, a career diplomat described by Reeker as “one of the foreign service great leaders.”

Reeker testified that the public effort to target Yovanovitch began weeks earlier with a column from John Solomon, a conservative opinion writer formerly with The Hill, who had interviewed Yuriy Lutsenko, Ukraine’s top prosecutor at the time. Lutsenko told Solomon that Yovanovitch had given him a list of figures he was not to prosecute, even as U.S. policy sought to rein in corruption in a country well known for it.

Both Yovanovitch and the State Department have denied the allegation, and Lutsenko has since walked it back.

Reeker dismissed it as an outright fabrication.

[...]

Nonetheless, the charge caught fire in the conservative press, attracting the attention of Trump’s allies and stirring more stories in the right-wing media.

And who, I wonder, put Solomon on that path?*

Reeker testified that it was the “understanding” of the State Department that the hold on military aid had originated with Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s acting chief of staff, and that Giuliani was fueling the narrative that Kyiv was undeserving of the funds by “feeding the president a lot of very negative views about Ukraine.”

“What we sensed was a very negative stream coming from Mr. Giuliani to the president,” he said.

The Ukraine meddling theory has been widely debunked, not least by a host of U.S. intelligence agencies that found Russia to be the culprit. Yet Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Tuesday that there are legitimate reasons to pursue Trump’s suspicions that Kyiv — not Moscow — was behind the interference.

[...]

In his testimony, Sandy [a senior official at the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB)] appeared to further link the president to claims that he directly ordered nearly $400 million in U.S. aid to be withheld as leverage to get Kyiv to open the two politically motivated investigations.

The official said the hold began to grip individuals in OMB, enough to motivate two staff members to resign in part because of their frustration with the aid being withheld. One such person was an OMB lawyer, Sandy said.

I don't believe we heard that before. I could be wrong.

Sandy said he was not given a reason for the aid hold.

The career civil servant said he was informed of the Ukraine hold in a July 12 email from Robert Blair, his supervisor, who served as a senior adviser to Mulvaney. Sandy said he was told that the president “is directing a hold on military support funding for Ukraine.”

Sandy testified that OMB began the process of implementing the hold on July 25, which fueled much concern and frustration in the office.

The day that Trump made that "perfect" call to Zelensky to personally extort him.

The move came a month after Mike Duffey, another one of Sandy's superiors, informed him in a June email that Trump had expressed “an interest in getting more information from the Department of Defense” regarding the security assistance program.

Sandy described the circumstances as unusual and said he brought his concerns to Duffey to tell him that if the funds were held too long, they could expire on Sept. 30, which would possibly “be a violation of the Impoundment Control Act.”

The funds were released Sept. 11.

Right after the press got wind of the deal and Schiff announced an investigation.


*

Scott Wong approached Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) on Friday amid the hubbub of an impeachment hearing. The lawmaker asked Wong where he worked. The Hill, where he’s a senior staff writer. Upon hearing this response, Speier quipped, “I’m not speaking to The Hill anymore. Sorry.”

There you have it: The legacy of John Solomon, a veteran Washington journalist who served simultaneously as an executive vice president at the Hill and as spinner of a flimsy and tendentious trail of reporting that the real collusion in the 2016 presidential election featured the Democrats and Ukrainian officials.

[...]

“I just find it reprehensible that any newspaper would just be willing to put that kind of crap out that is not — has no veracity whatsoever, and not check to see if it had any veracity,” Speier said, according to audio reported by Politico’s Michael Calderone. “And then it becomes a talking point. And he becomes a nonpartisan commentator. It’s corrupt. It’s just corrupt.”

When the Erik Wemple Blog reached Wong by phone, he referred us to his supervisor, citing a company policy that the Hill’s reporters shouldn’t speak to reporters.

  WaPo

That's rich.

Witness after witness — all of them under oath — has slammed Solomon’s series of articles for containing a tenuous connection to actual events. “It was, if not entirely made up in full cloth, it was primarily non-truths and non-sequiturs,” said George Kent, a senior State Department official, in reference to a key Solomon article from March 2019.

[...]

For good measure, Yovanovitch denied a rumor — also raised in Solomon’s reporting — that she had bad-mouthed President Trump in Ukraine by saying his orders must be ignored because of his likely impeachment. “I did not and I would not say such a thing. Such statements would be inconsistent with my training as a Foreign Service officer and my role as an ambassador,” said Yovanovitch.

There’ll be no endorsement here of Speier’s action. We’d prefer a world in which public officials accepted all reasonable questions regardless of their provenance. Yet the petit flare-up may serve to shake the leadership of the Hill out of its denial regarding Solomon’s work. Though Solomon departed from the organization earlier this fall — the circumstances of the split remain unclear — he has left behind the stink of a rotten fish in the site’s archives. And it’s wafting into the corridors of Capitol Hill.

Maybe the impeachment investigation needs to include testimony from Solomon - where did he first hear these unfounded rumors about Yovanovitch that he printed without investigating?

In Wong’s exchange with Speier, the reporter stressed that he works on the Hill’s news side, whereas Solomon was an “opinion contributor,” a risible title invented when Solomon’s conspiratorial “news” stories so alienated staffers that they demanded distance from the veteran Washington scribe. According to Calderone, Speier dismissed the distinction. As she should have.

[...]

Meantime, Solomon isn’t budging. “I stand by each and every one of the columns that I wrote,” Solomon said in a statement — a statement provided to . . . the Hill.

You've got to say one thing about Trumpers: they rarely back down.

On Nov. 19, House Intelligence Committee ranking member Devin Nunes, R-Calif., opened the second week of public impeachment hearings by citing Solomon’s scoops and findings as fact.

"Solomon’s reporting on Burisma, Hunter Biden and Ukraine election meddling has become inconvenient for the Democratic narrative," Nunes said in his statement, which came just one day after The Hill announced it would be reviewing, annotating and correcting Solomon’s columns.

[...]

The veteran Washington, D.C., reporter has become a regular on Fox News and a go-to source of information for Trump.

[...]

His columns alleged corruption by Biden and a former ambassador and accused Democrats of working with Ukraine to hurt Trump’s chances in 2016. They gained traction as Trump, his allies and various Fox News hosts talked about them on TV and social media.

[...]

Solomon worked for years at the Associated Press and briefly at the Washington Post before moving to the Washington Times, where he was editor in chief. He later spent time at Circa and the Center for Public Integrity before joining The Hill in 2017.

[...]

In 2017, he played a major role in pushing the inaccurate Uranium One conspiracy, alleging that Hillary Clinton sold a share of America’s uranium to Russia in exchange for a massive donation to the Clinton Foundation.

  Politifact

He should have spent more time at the Center for Public Integrity.

In 2018, The Hill began labeling Solomon’s articles as opinion.

That's rich. Don't can the guy because his stories don't pass the factual reporting test. Keep printing them and call them opinion.

Then, in March and April 2019, Solomon published a series of columns alleging conspiracies involving Democrats and Ukraine.

One of his key sources, apparently, was former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer.

Bingo!

Solomon left The Hill in September for undisclosed reasons, and Fox News soon hired him. He has stood by his work as "completely accurate and transparent," even as one impeachment witness after another has questioned his findings.

[...]

He has had an assist from Fox News host Sean Hannity, Giuliani and Trump, who tweeted about Solomon’s work four times and recently suggested he should win a Pulitzer Prize.