How Spy Agencies ‘Massaged’ Trump’s Briefings to Bury Election Warnings | John Solomon

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW]Newly released documents reveal how evidence of Chinese penetration of voter registration files and plots to interfere in the election were withheld or downplayed.

The new files reveal one of the intelligence officers said they “deliberately massaged” the presidential daily briefing in 2020 to downplay election-related information, with another stating, “I’m basically running a shadow government across the FBI at this point.”

John Solomon is chair of the White House Government Transparency Task Force, an award-winning journalist, and founder of Just the News. He breaks down key documents his task force has released—and what more we can expect to see in the coming days and months.

Newly declassified documents also upend the prevailing narrative on the Biden–Ukraine story, revealing how the FBI allegedly ran a secret operation known as Round River. According to the documents, it labelled whistleblowers as Russian “conduits” and dismissed the evidence they provided on the Biden family as “Russian disinformation.”

John Solomon places Round River within a broader sequence of FBI operations targeting Trump that included Crossfire Hurricane, Plasmic Echo, and Arctic Frost. This is “a wash, rinse, repeat cycle,” he said, going all the way back to the 2016 election and the debunked “Trump–Russia collusion” narrative.

In this episode, we examine questions of accountability, the extent of the cover-up, and whether FBI Director Kash Patel will be successful in building a “grand conspiracy” case.

Note: This interview was filmed before the latest document drop related to former Rep. Eric Swalwell and alleged Chinese operative Fang Fang.

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:

Jan, thanks for having me on.

Mr. Jekielek:

So, you know, about a year ago, we did an interview together. I’ll read you the title. It was nine years later: Here’s what we know about the origins of the Russia probe. Now we’re 10 years later, and you’re the, I guess, the unpaid chairman of the White House Government Transparency Task Force. And you are declassifying or, you know, kind of bringing out a whole bunch of declassified information that the president has declassified. Absolutely fascinating. Tell me, just to start us off, what do you think is the single most, I don’t know, incredible thing? And, you know, obviously we both know a lot here that you’ve discovered in these newly declassified documents.

Mr. Solomon:

At the end of the day, Crossfire Hurricane, which was the original investigation, morphed into additional operations that continued long after the Mueller Report allegedly put together or put to bed Russia. And so, what we’re now seeing, and I think the most important documents we’ve released to date, other than the election integrity documents—very important because we want to secure our election systems for the 26th election—is the fact that as soon as Russia collusion was put to bed by the Mueller report, it concluded there wasn’t a criminal conspiracy between Trump and Vladimir Putin to hijack the 2016 election. Russia morphed into a new weapon for the intelligence community and for the law enforcement community that despised or disliked Donald Trump. 

Let’s remind everybody really at its heart what Crossfire Hurricane was. It was a Democratic opposition research project that was handed to the FBI, and the FBI turned it into a three-year criminal investigation, even though very early on they realized that what they had, the Steele dossier and all the other related allegations, were either debunked or unprovable. As Peter Strzok said by May of 2017, no big there there. Or as agent William Barnett said, a bad game of Clue. We tried to pretend two people were conspiring together just because they were in the same vicinity, and that wasn’t the case. So even though they knew Russia collusion wasn’t true, they put President Trump through three years of investigation and the people around him, and it hampered a large part of the first part of his 45th presidency. 

As soon as that comes to an end, it is about the time that I write my stories at the Hill saying that Hunter Biden was getting paid large sums of money from Burisma Holdings, a company that the U.S. government considered corruption in Ukraine, and that Burisma seemed to have an interest in decisions that Joe Biden, as the vice president, was making at the end of the Obama era. That narrative began to gain great steam. The New York Times and ABC News wrote big stories that match my original reporting. 

And it appears, not using anyone else’s words, but the government’s words, that the FBI, the same FBI, and some of the same players in the Russia collusion case, morphed into a new operation. It was called Round River. It is not an investigation. It has the latitude where you can do things you can’t do in an investigation. 

In an investigation, you have to have a predicate. You have to have probable cause to believe someone committed a crime. In an operation, you could assess that something is a threat to the American public and try to neutralize that threat. And so, right around the time that Mueller makes his conclusions, a new operation springs up. It’s called Round River. And its goal, in its own words, was to neutralize the Ukraine narrative—the narrative that Joe Biden and Hunter Biden had a corruption problem in Ukraine.

The way they set about doing it is by using the term Russian disinformation. Anything that’s negative or derogatory about Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Barack Obama, George Soros, and many others, is Russian disinformation. Anybody looking into it, including the sitting Attorney General, Bill Barr, the sitting Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, two sitting senators, two members of Congress and the House, all of whom were investigating it, myself as a reporter, Gregg Jarrett, Fox News—they were all labeled as conduits of Russian disinformation.

In other words, Republicans and conservatives looking into the merits of the allegation are propagandists for Russia, and the Democrats who might have been involved in the narrative, might have been involved in a corruption scheme—they’re victims or targets of Russian disinformation. Russia, Russia, Russia evolved from an allegation against Donald Trump into a protection racket for Joe Biden and the Democrats. 

And the most stunning part of that operation was that this strike force of analysts, FBI analysts, were going into confidential human source files, the files normally controlled by agents who handle very confidential informants. They were inserting into the file a memo or a declaration that the information about Joe Biden from this informant is Russian disinformation, essentially neutralizing the use of that information, probably making it unusable in future criminal cases and rendering it useless for the Intelligence Committee.

Now, some of these informants had long and successful relationships. One of them went back to 2008, and had been serving for 12 years on and off. Some analysts went in and decided to derail that confidential human source relationship by just putting a Russian information disclaimer on the Joe Biden information that person was providing. We now know from the files we released that 14 such informants were providing derogatory information on Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, or the family. At least three were then labeled Russian disinformation. 

And all of that was done—the dividing of the people, the assigning of conduit and target names, the neutralizing of informants by claiming they were giving Russian disinformation. All of it was done without those FBI analysts taking any effort to find out if the Ukraine narrative was actually true. Truth didn’t matter. Whether you’re a Democrat or Republican mattered, whether you were on one side of the narrative or the other. That’s all that was used to distinguish whether you were a Russian propagandist or a victim. That is why in 2025, the Intelligence Committee looked at it and expressed grave concern, and why today, recently, the FBI Director, Kash Patel, announced that he’s investigating his own personnel for misconduct in this operation.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, it’s fascinating because if you look at the totality, you know, Crossfire Hurricane and then Round River and perhaps some of these other ops, on the one hand, they were elevating some informants that were basically spewing nonsense; Christopher Steele, Igor Danchenko, and Stephan Halper come to mind, right?

Mr. Solomon:

Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:

And at the same time, they were kind of downgrading or in some cases, really casting huge doubts on people that were seemingly providing very good information. It’s kind of both things at play. Is that what you’re seeing?

Mr. Solomon:

I am. I have said a couple of times in the last week that Round River is the mirror reverse image of Crossfire Hurricane. In Crossfire Hurricane, unproven, politically charged allegations from Hillary Clinton’s campaign were used to investigate a president. And in Round River, validated information coming from validated confidential human sources that were derogatory or suggesting that there was evidence Joe Biden did something wrong. We’re being neutralized. 

And that’s where I think the larger system of dual justice looks more and more pronounced: protect Joe Biden, attack Donald Trump. The information against Donald Trump turns out unproven, unvalidated, in some cases disproven. The evidence against Joe Biden was actually pretty pronounced and provable. 

I want to remind people of something very important. At the moment when Round River was in action in 2020, the FBI had Hunter Biden’s laptop. On that laptop, they had the evidence of what Burisma wanted from Joe Biden and his family. They had evidence of what Hunter Biden was getting paid. They even had evidence that Hunter Biden had admitted to his own lawyers or his lawyers and he had talked about the fact that he had failed to pay American taxes on a large sum of money from Burisma. They had validation that what the confidential human sources were telling the FBI was true because Hunter Biden’s own laptop showed it was true.

And still, this Round River team went out to try to portray it as Russian disinformation. That isn’t putting a finger on the scale of an American election. It’s putting a whole body on the American election. And that means the intelligence community and the FBI, at least its counterintelligence division, were interfering in an American election by picking winners and losers.

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, the FBI director, Kash Patel, has said he will release the actual 14 confidential informant files. When do you think we might see those?

Mr. Solomon:

Probably in the next month or two, it takes a little while to mark them down and make sure we protect things that are important. But I will say this: every component of the United States government—the Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the ODNI, and the State Department, Treasury Department—have been unbelievably cooperative in following the president’s executive order or a presidential order on this. We have gathered millions of pages of documents, the really relevant ones declassified in record time. And almost every two or three days now, the task force is in a position to release new documents. We’ll be doing some more of that in the next few days, and all through the summer and into the fall, I think we’ll be able to put out all the documents that we’ve got and tell stories and help people understand their importance.

Mr. Jekielek:

One of the big things you have been doing is looking into the 2020 election. And, you know, we did get indications back in the day and got a lot of trouble for first talking about this—that there was Chinese Communist Party [CCP] interference, that there were questions about whether certain vote tallies were valid. Why don’t you kind of lay out for me what it is that you found?

Mr. Solomon:

A lot of people think because the first evidence had some 2020, that our goal was to look at the 2020 election. It wasn’t. What we did is look at a 20-year window of intelligence about the security of our elections. Were foreigners interfering? Were domestic players interfering? Were there vulnerabilities that we knew about that we had not fixed? So we look all the way from 2006, where the first warnings about Venezuela and compromisable vending machines started to flow to the CIA, all the way to 2026. 

The reason the year 2020 stands out is it was a big focal point of the president’s speech, but only because it’s in that year that some of the largest vulnerabilities in American election history are discovered. During that election, and despite the fact that they’re discovered, career people in the intelligence community made conscious decisions to keep that information from their president, their Congress, and the American public.

As we pointed out in the documents we released last month, there were intelligence officers bragging that they were withholding information from the president or from Congress. They would use words like politics, or one of them boasted that they were running a shadow government to keep election intelligence from the American public, the president, and Congress. Others talked about it, saying that it boggles the mind that we’re going to keep the president in the dark on this.

In a few days, we’re going to release a document that shows just how high up the suppression of government intelligence about election threats was. It goes very high in the career infrastructure of the intelligence community. So all of it’s flowing in, and for the first time in a very long time, the intelligence community is not reporting it to policymakers: the President of the United States, Donald Trump, and Congress, which, by the way, was partly in Democratic hands at that point.

It’s a very troubling trend line to see politics supplant national security as the reason whether or not something gets briefed to a president. There’s a memo where you see one of these spy agencies bragging that “we’re massaging the PDB [President’s Daily Brief], the way that the president gets his intelligence every day, to keep out the election stuff. That is, as one person said in their own emails, mind-boggling. Our voters and our Congress were kept in the dark. 

And by the way, what those vulnerabilities showed is that for six years, from 2020 to 2026, we had a glass chin of election security. We were being told we were in the most secure election environment in history, but the intelligence showed just the opposite. There are four key components of what the intelligence showed. And until the president made it public in July, most Americans, most members of Congress, and most presidents did not know about it because the intelligence community chose not to tell them.

The first vulnerability was that our election counting machines were vulnerable to being hacked by five foreign powers. There were five foreign powers that had known cyber hacking capabilities that could breach known vulnerabilities on election machines.This was first assessed by the Intelligence Committee in January. The first time the American public learned about it was July 26th, from President Trump. The five powers are China, North Korea, Iran, Russia, and Venezuela. As the year went on, the concern about those vulnerabilities became more pronounced. Why? 

Because in September of 2020, about nine months after the assessment was made that there are machine vulnerabilities, the CIA observed Venezuela conducting an experiment where they were able to successfully breach an election counting machine and change the votes. And by the way, change the vote counts without it being detectable in a post-audit or in a post-image review. How did they do that? 

They had an election machine with ballots and counts on it. As it was working its way up to the vote-counting area, a mirror server was created. Somebody sucked the real votes off, placed fake votes in, and then sent them up so that when the audit occurred, the fake votes would be the only ballots you could see. You couldn’t see the original ballots as they were cast by that. Now, that was in a controlled environment in Venezuela. It didn’t happen during a real election; it happened during election testing. 

But its significance to the intelligence community was, this isn’t hypothetical anymore. Someone figured out a way to do this. And the CIA was extremely concerned about it. But guess what? Our president, our Congress, and the American people didn’t get told. And for six more years, we went through thinking our machines weren’t hackable when they were.

The second vulnerability that the president announced in July that we were able to find in the documents was the fact that China began penetrating and collecting Americans’ voter registration files. They bought some lawfully; they stole some illegally, and they hacked some illegally. They used all three tactics. 

And they eventually got enough information on 220 million voter registration files, enough to play mayhem. And the intelligence community saw this in January as being a threat. And by the spring, they realized the threat had become a reality. China had begun. But they didn’t tell us. They didn’t tell the states. They didn’t alert states that were being targeted.

Instead, China just kept backing up information, in 2020, tens of millions of files in 18 states. By 2023, because no one spoke up, it got to 220 million votes, and we believe in all 50 states. The intelligence community understood China’s threat once they had accomplished this. They assessed that once China had a voter registration file, if you could get some of the non-public data that China got, you could go in and vote for me early.

Then I would show up at the polls on Election Day because maybe I’m an Election Day voter. They would tell me, sorry, Mr. Solomon, you can’t vote because you already voted. And it would have been China voting for you. They could have gone in and changed your address in the voter file. And you’d show up and say, here’s my license. They would say, sir, you’re not at that license. You’re registered over here. You can’t vote. Or the best you could do is vote provisionally, and maybe we will, or maybe we won’t count you. 

And there were other nefarious things that China was in a position to do, despite knowing what they could do and despite knowing that they had a large amount of data, they didn’t inform the American public until President Trump did. In the summer of 2020, beyond knowing about the Venezuela project, they also knew about something else. 

An FBI confidential human source, twice validated, not once but twice checked out as good by the FBI, reported that China was sending some driver’s licenses into America to possibly request ballots to create fake votes for Joe Biden. The FBI agents who handled the informant validated the informant not once, but twice, and they tried to tell the other 17 intelligence agencies, this is coming from a good source. Let’s see if it’s true. 

Instead, the FBI recalled that report, ordered it to be destroyed, and prevented the CIA, the NSA, and other intelligence agencies from being able to investigate whether China had done that. And they recalled that report, even though the FBI had found some of these driver’s licenses entering into the country in Chicago through Chicago O’Hare Airport. That’s the suppression. 

So we had a suppression of information about the voting machine vulnerabilities. We had a suppression about China collecting large amounts of voter registration data, including non-public data that could be used in nefarious ways. And we had a suppression that China actually activated potentially and tried to bring some fake licenses and create some fake ballots in the 2020 election.

The third thing that was suppressed from the American public was the discovery of a voter mill in Michigan, a domestic one run by a Democrat-funded group that was knowingly and willfully, according to its own workers, creating fake voter registration profiles that people then could use to request ballots. People would talk about, if I couldn’t find a real voter, I made it up. I signed it myself. I made up names. I used my friends. 

The FBI had clear evidence of a criminal effort to create fake voter registrations in America. And despite repeated efforts over four years, they could not get the Biden Justice Department to investigate, excuse me, to indict what the investigation found as criminal activity. It was covered up. It’s a dual system of justice. 

The final thing that we have been able to close is the revelation that there are large numbers of non-citizens who’ve made it onto the voter rolls of multiple states, at least 18 states, at least 270,000, maybe more, but at least 270,000. And some of those people have voted. When the president announced that in mid-July, immediately Democrats, including the governor of New Jersey, came out and said, conspiracy theory, not true. More of Donald Trump’s election lies.

Then a few days later, the New Jersey governor had to turn around and say, no, sorry. We definitely had 6,600 non-citizens on our voter roll, and 400 of them we allowed to vote in elections. We allowed 400 voters, foreign voters, not allowed to vote in federal elections; they got to vote. By the way, that’s the largest concentration of foreigners ever allowed to vote in any history. So the governor who called it a conspiracy theory soon had to admit it was the truth. Those are the vulnerabilities that the documents we released thus far show.

Very soon, we’ll be releasing a fifth vulnerability. It will be focused on looking at ways that China has gained influence in a very important political institution and the FBI’s knowledge of it, potentially the FBI’s complicity in it. And it will raise a lot of questions about not only failing to punish some bad behavior, but also whether the FBI’s way of penetrating and stopping China is in some ways flawed. And we’ll be able to talk about that in the next couple of weeks as well.

Mr. Jekielek:

Okay. Any hints? Which institution?

Mr. Solomon:

No, but I will say this. We once had a scandal in America in the 90s. I covered it. In fact, I broke the original stories. It was myself and Bob Woodward and the Wall Street Journal about the China fundraising scandal of the 1990s involving Bill Clinton, the Lincoln bedroom, the Buddhist monks. It would not be unsurprising to people to think that China would go back and once again try to inject money into the political system through a particular institution. 

And so, it follows that the Chinese go back and reuse the same tactics. They let a little time pass and they reactivate. And I think, given that we know they were targeting voter files, maybe trying to get voter registration votes for Donald Trump or for Joe Biden, it wouldn’t surprise me that they also were looking for ways to get money into the U.S. election to influence that election.

Mr. Jekielek:

Now, John, you also talked about some declassified documents that showed that a hacker obtained 633,000 voter files in Arizona, got him to confess, but then there was a declination to bring charges. Can you kind of flesh that one out a bit for me?

Mr. Solomon:

And just keep in mind that this decision by the Justice Department not to prosecute this hacker in Maricopa County is occurring in the same window where the FBI and the Justice Department are pursuing hundreds of misdemeanor trespassing cases over the January 6th event. What they had in Maricopa was a felony invasion of voter fraud, a cyber hacking felony. And they don’t prosecute that, but they do prosecute misdemeanor trespassing charges in the Capitol.

Now, I don’t condone anything that happened in the Capitol that day, but you do see this recurring wash, rinse, repeat cycle of one group of people being prosecuted to the hilt and another being ignored for prosecution. And that pattern is going to happen several times over the next few weeks as we release more documents. What did they learn? 

On the eve of the election, a U.S. intelligence task force—several spy agencies working together: the FBI, the NSA, the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security [DHS]—were monitoring all of our critical infrastructure for the 2020 election. Why were they doing that? Because for the whole year, they kind of knew that the threat level was growing. Machines were vulnerable. China had voter data. Now, they weren’t telling the president, they weren’t telling Congress, but they knew internally, you better watch the systems. 

And as they’re watching the systems, they see a bunch of voter files, about 630,000 of them, exfiltrated, taken off of the Maricopa County Registrar site, just sucked out like a vacuum. They report it to the FBI. The FBI goes and does its work very effectively and very quickly. They determine it’s a domestic actor, not a foreigner. They find the guy. They confront him.

He says, I did it. I confess. I’m responsible. Here’s how I did it. I found this vulnerability. I wrote a little script, and I one by one extracted people’s voter files, and I put them on my hard drive at home, and I kept them. I knew you were coming to raid my home. I destroyed them just before you got here. He admitted to everything. That’s a felony cyber-intrusion event. It had concerned every one of our intelligence agencies.The FBI expended enormous resources. 

And then the Biden Justice Department, the Arizona Attorney General, the Maricopa County District Attorney, and the Pinal County District Attorney all declined to prosecute that man and put him in prison or to create some penalty for what is one of the largest domestic breaches of voter data ever recorded by the FBI. 

Around the same time that’s going on, not only are people being prosecuted for misdemeanor entry into the Capitol, but Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro are being locked up for not giving testimony to Congress. People look at this and have read these files and said, this looks like a dual system of justice. Looking at the facts, I understand why some people come to that conclusion.

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, I just want to go back to this briefly. You know, the president is supposed to be the decision-maker-in-chief, and his daily briefing is not getting a lot of this incredibly important information, like highly important and actionable information. Your thoughts here?

Mr. Solomon:

We are playing a game of Russian roulette. I hate to use the word Russian given all the Russia collusion stuff, but it’s a game of roulette. We are playing with national security because certain people in the intelligence and law enforcement community think their personal politics are more important, or that the political wishes of their agency are more important than the national security of the United States. And I think that that is a very damning dynamic that could come to bite us in a big way in the future.

After 9/11, I did a lot of the award-winning reporting on the failures of the intelligence community. Those failures to not connect the dots, to not realize that the hijackers were training in local Arab Islamist pilots were training in American schools. They thought, that’s a problem. Or that there was a meeting in Malaysia and they were talking about flying planes into buildings, and nobody thought, hey, we got that. Plus, some of those guys are training right now, and put that together. They had a guy named Moussaoui in Minnesota and put that together. 

Those oversights were caused not by someone’s politics, but by dysfunction in the intelligence agencies. In 2026, there may be some of that still going on. I look at January 6th, and now we see how much warning the FBI had about it and they didn’t act on it. That looks to be a non-political non-action, but again, maybe not connecting the dots. 

But the stuff we’re talking about related to election security and integrity, it is overtly political. The U.S. intelligence community ombudsman said political motives kept the intelligence community from telling the president about certain vulnerabilities and certain Chinese meddling in the election. People wrote in their contemporaneous emails, I’m not giving this to the president. Some people wrote, I can’t believe we’re not giving it to him. It boggles my mind. We’re not going to tell the president about this. 

One wrote, we’ve created a shadow government to keep this from coming to public. There’s going to be a new document that comes out in a few days that goes even further to show just the overt willingness of someone to say, because of politics, I’m going to keep my president, my Congress, and the American people in the dark about actionable intelligence. Most of it is related to elections. I don’t know why elections are such a problem for people who want to speak the truth. 

But that effort to cover things up, like the effort to neutralize the Joe Biden scandal, as we talked about earlier, is putting politics before security, politics before equal justice in our country. And at some point, somewhere down the road, I fear it’s going to lead to an episode where we don’t stop something and terrible consequences happen, that we’re going to have a great degree of regret because one or more people put their politics ahead of their country’s security.

Mr. Jekielek:

John, as we finish up, and I really appreciate your time, I know you came directly from the White House to do this, which I really appreciate. The FBI director, Kash Patel, is looking to build a kind of grand conspiracy case. We know that there are these multiple efforts. We’ve got around the river, we’ve got, of course, all this election stuff, this withholding of information. How does all of this work towards this kind of a grand conspiracy case, in your view?

Mr. Solomon:

Well, the most important object of my work at the White House, and I was picked because I’m a journalist. They wanted me to bring a journalist mindset to this. It’s like when you ask a journalist to be in a pool because a lot of people can’t go into a place, but I can. Then I come back and try to get for the American public and for the journalists who report to it the information, which is to just inform the American public about truths that they’ve long been denied, important things that they’ve long been denied the truth about. 

We were told it was the most secure election in 2020. It wasn’t. Iran hacked 100,000 files. China got 220 million. Maricopa County got 660,000. We knew our machines were vulnerable to at least five countries. We saw an experimental hack occur in Venezuela. And we were fed a sugar pill telling us that everything was just all right when it wasn’t quite all right at all. The value of putting that information out is that we’ve now activated the government, and the Trump administration is taking active measures to fix those vulnerabilities so we don’t have to go into ‘26, ‘28, or ‘30 worrying about them. 

In the case of what happened from 2016 to January 2025, it’s a wash, rinse, repeat cycle. The same agencies, many times the same people inside those agencies, overtly did not like Donald Trump or the people that followed Donald Trump. Remember the smelly Walmart people talked about by Pete Strzok and Lisa Page? They continued an operation of finding something to go after Trump and his followers or finding something to protect Democrats from facing accountability for. And you’re going to see that come out again. 

We just educated people about Joe Biden and Round River. There’ll be another Democrat that escapes accountability that people will see soon. It’s a wash, rinse, repeat cycle. The first one is Crossfire Hurricane. The second one is Round River.  And the third one is Plasmic Echo. The fourth one is Arctic Frost. And the third one is Plasmic Echo. In each one of those codenamed FBI intelligence community investigations, the goal is to harm, hurt, tar Donald Trump and his followers or to protect the Democrats. 

In 2016, Hillary had a Russia problem. Donald Trump was made to look like it. In Round River, Joe Biden had a corruption problem. Donald Trump was made to look like he corruptly did something with Ukraine. In 2021, they discovered Joe Biden had a classified documents problem. By 2022, they were raiding Mar-a-Lago to make it look like Donald Trump had a problem. 

Then in 2024, as Joe Biden is mentally declining and there are concerns about what he’s done, the Russian war, and other things that have happened, they create Arctic Frost to make it look like the Democrats and the Republicans had some grand conspiracy to hijack an election through the Senate. In all of those investigations, American civil liberties were violated. Our privacy was intruded upon. Laws were broken, and it’s an ongoing conspiracy. 

What started in July 2016 with Crossfire Hurricane is continuing all the way up until January 2025 with Arctic Frost. Members of Congress’ phone records are taken. People are called Russian disinformation artists when they are not. That cycle is being looked at as one grand conspiracy: a wash, rinse, repeat set of events, same people, same modus operandi, different events, but hurting Republicans and harming their civilities, protecting Democrats who might have done something wrong. 

If the prosecutors in Florida can prove that to a grand jury, and they are meeting regularly now in Fort Pierce, Florida, and there are some FBI agents who are cooperating now, if they provide enough evidence that a grand jury creates indictments, people will feel maybe that they got some accountability and also that there will be some deterrence so that in the 2026, 2028, and 2030 elections, people won’t be tempted to do this going forward. So that’s what the grand conspiracy case is all about.

Mr. Jekielek:

John, I’m tempted because I have to ask you this one final question. You know, the efforts to kind of hide these operations from existence and this Oxferd C0mma operation, you know, this astonishingly launched after Trump, basically, fires the FBI director, James Comey. Just a quick thought on that. Like, why this bizarre name and why this bizarre operation?

Mr. Solomon:

The FBI has lots of fun names. It’s an art form to pick a name for a special operation. Round River was meant to convey that what’s coming from Ukraine is actually starting in Russia, being laundered through. It wasn’t, but that’s what Round River is about. Both James Comey and President Trump like the Oxferd C0mma; they openly talk about the importance of it as a literary punctuation. Let’s remind people what Oxferd C0mma is about. 

They actually alleged that Donald Trump fired James Comey because Donald Trump was a Russian asset working at the behest of Vladimir Putin. Now, the people who approved this investigation, Rod Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General, knew why James Comey was fired. He’s the one who signed the paperwork. They knew in May of 2017, when they opened Oxferd C0mma, there was no evidence that Donald Trump was complicit with Russia. 

Despite knowing that, and despite knowing the real reasons they fired James Comey for violating Justice Department regulations over the Hillary Clinton investigation, they allowed that case to go over and become the object of a special prosecutor. Millions of American tax dollars were spent, and two more years of the Trump presidency were entangled in a scandal that never was. 

As John Durham told us in 2023 when he released a report through the Biden Justice Department, the Biden Justice Department sanctioned this report, there wasn’t one iota of evidence ever to investigate Donald Trump for conspiracy with Russia, but we were put through all that.

Mr. Jekielek:

But what about the zero in the C0mma, and the e in the Oxferd?

Mr. Solomon:

Not surprising at all. These were called special circumstances cases. So they would do little things to make sure that even their own employees would not be able to find the case. If you didn’t know the exact spelling, you couldn’t find it. Remember the burn bags in California? 

Patel told us he found evidence that could have been destroyed but was retrieved. There were lots of crafty ways that the FBI was trying to hide from the American public what looks to be very nefarious behavior. So a couple of punctuation changes, a few burn bags. Not surprising given what we’ve seen in the last decade.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, John Solomon, you know, you’re doing incredibly important work. Thank you for taking a bit of time to join me and just kind of lay it out so, I guess, simply, which I think you have. And a final quick thought.

Mr. Solomon:

I worry 10 years into this cycle that there hasn’t been an accountability event that would make someone right now who might be thinking about putting their thumb on the scale of the 2026 election think twice or be deterred from it because no one’s been punished. And until punishment is meted out in a way that creates deterrence, our great republic, our great election system, is extremely vulnerable to continued election interference, both foreign and domestic, until we start holding. 

That’s something as a journalist that I look at and say, until you nip it in the bud, the flower is going to keep growing. It’s a rotten flower, and it threatens all of our voting rights, all of our constitutional protections. So what I’m looking for as a journalist, what I do in this job here, is to chronicle what the government will do to create deterrence going forward. Otherwise, we risk becoming a banana republic.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, we’re going to join you in that effort. John Solomon, it’s such a pleasure to have had you on.

Mr. Solomon:

It was great to be on, Jan. Love your show.

This interview was partially edited for clarity and brevity.