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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 Dozen Questions for John Solomon

by Sidney Blumenthal
November 5, 2019

EXCERPT...

Solomon began his career as a reporter for the Associated Press, but subsequently bounced around in right-wing media from the Washington Times to a website called Circa News (owned by Sinclair Media and now defunct). In 2012, the Columbia Journalism Review concluded that Solomon “has a history of bending the truth to his story line” and “distorting facts and hyping petty stories.” Among his claims to infamy is publishing the debunked Uranium One conspiracy.

Starting in March of this year, Solomon’s articles in The Hill and his tweets spun out a web of conspiracy theories, in some cases then tweeted by Trump: that parts of the Ukrainian government in coordination with the U.S. ambassador to the Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch colluded to help Hillary Clinton’s campaign by leaking financial records of Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chairman (who had been a consultant to the Russian backed Ukrainian president deposed in the 2014 revolution Viktor Yanukovych); that the U.S. ambassador had pressured the Ukraine prosecutor not to investigate a George Soros-backed group and “Soros-connected names” who helped the Clinton campaign in the alleged scheme; and that the ambassador told the prosecutor not to investigate a list of individuals and that, according to the prosecutor, former Vice President Joe Biden was supposedly attempting to quash the prosecutor’s probe of his son Hunter’s involvement with Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company.

Solomon depicted a second innocent victim of these conspiracies in addition to Trump: Ukrainian oligarch Dimitry Firtash, “a major target of the Soros group.” Firtash — close to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian mafia kingpin Semion Mogilevich, and a chief financier of former Ukrainian president Yanukovych — is fighting extradition to avoid U.S. federal charges of bribery and racketeering. Solomon wrote that Robert Mueller’s investigation was attempting to frame Firtash to get “some dirt on Donald Trump,” but that the case against Firtash was “falling apart.” Solomon stated, “The oligarch’s defense team told me that Firtash rejected the deal because he didn’t have credible information or evidence.”

The State Department labeled the charges in Solomon’s initial article about Yovanovitch “an outright fabrication.” Later, the Ukrainian prosecutor Solomon quoted as his source, Yuri Lutsenko, was dismissed from his position and disavowed Solomon’s reporting, saying that Hunter Biden “did not violate anything” and now said that his statements to Solomon about a do-not-prosecute list were false. Lutsenko is now under criminal investigation for abuse of power. Meanwhile, the effort to extradite Firtash to face corruption charges continues.

SNIP...

7. You claim that you met Parnas through Congressman Pete Sessions. When did you first become aware of the Parnas and Fruman financial contributions to Sessions? What other favors has Sessions done for you?

CONTINUES...

https://www.justsecurity.org/66962/a-dozen-questions-for-john-solomon/