An effort to neutralize one of Hillary Clinton’s biggest vulnerabilities in the 2016 presidential race ultimately set in motion the Russia collusion investigation into President Donald Trump, veteran journalist John Solomon said on the latest episode of “Pod Force One.”
Solomon, founder of Just the News and leader of a Trump administration task force focused on government transparency, said polling conducted for the former secretary of state—and the campaign’s reaction to it—helped launch what he described as a decade-long, Democrat-led “wash, rinse, repeat cycle” of federal investigations targeting Trump.
“The origins of that wash, rinse, repeat cycle are in the November/December 2015 timeframe,” Solomon told “Pod Force One” host Miranda Devine. “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 poll was designed to determine which controversy involving Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, most concerned voters, Solomon said. The couple had faced years of political scandals and investigations.
Yet voters were not most troubled by Whitewater, Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky and his subsequent impeachment, the 1996 campaign-finance controversy involving China, or Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. According to Solomon, the result left Clinton’s team “stunned.”
“The one they’re most concerned about is Uranium One and the Clinton family’s relationship with Russia,” Solomon said.
The controversy centered on what Solomon described as a $500,000 payment to Bill Clinton from Moscow for a speech, while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state and the administration was approving what he characterized as favors for Russia. Those included the sale of a stake in an American uranium company, Uranium One, as well as utility contracts, the Just the News founder said.
“But the Clintons find in this poll … that that scandal was going to be the largest impediment to her election,” Solomon said.
“It’s at that point,” Solomon continued, “they decide to hang a Russian shingle on Donald Trump’s campaign house.”
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In April 2016, Perkins Coie, the law firm representing Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, hired opposition-research firm Fusion GPS to investigate Trump.
Fusion GPS later brought in former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele to examine Trump’s international business dealings. His work became the basis for the now-debunked Steele dossier.
Then, in September 2016, former Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann presented the FBI with computer data that purportedly linked Trump to Kremlin-connected Alfa Bank. The claims were later debunked.
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“They need to project their sins on Donald Trump, or whoever the Republican nominee is going to be,” Solomon said. He argued that the goal of the Kremlin-collusion narrative was to “hang a fake Russian scandal on the Republicans to neutralize Hillary Clinton’s campaign.”
Solomon also claimed that the Obama administration, including former President Barack Obama, knew about Clinton’s alleged effort to create a scandal involving Trump.
“They know about it. Even briefed the President of the United States, Barack Obama, at the time, and nobody stops it,” he said.
“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.”
