Investigative journalist John Solomon says Hillary Clinton’s 2015 poll on her Russia-tied scandals launched a decade of federal probes against Donald Trump he calls a wash-rinse-repeat cycle.
On Miranda Devine’s “Pod Force One,” veteran journalist John Solomon laid out a sequence he says began not with Russian interference, but with the Clinton campaign’s own political weakness. The New York Post featured Solomon describing how a late-2015 poll, opposition research, and later FBI contacts produced years of Russia collusion scrutiny that he argues was built on material since exposed as false.
Solomon, founder of Just the News and head of a Trump administration task force on government transparency, told Devine the pattern of investigations against Trump has run for a decade. He placed its start in the November and December 2015 window, when Clinton’s team measured which of her scandals most threatened her path to the White House.
“The origins of that wash, rinse, repeat cycle are in the November/December 2015 timeframe,” Solomon said. “It’s around that time... that Hillary Clinton does a poll and it takes all the scandals that have been in the Clinton world.”
Solomon said the finding that mattered most was Russia. He described Bill Clinton taking a $500,000 fee from Moscow for a speech while Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, was extending favors that included Russian access to American uranium through a company called Uranium One, plus utility contracts.
“The one they’re most concerned about is Uranium One and the Clinton family’s relationship with Russia,” Solomon said. “But the Clintons find in this poll... that that scandal was going to be the largest impediment to her election.”
His account holds that the response was not to clear the air. It was to shift the Russia problem onto the Republican nominee. Clinton remains a central figure in partisan combat years later, including moments when Hillary Clinton’s Lake Ontario jab at Trump drew sharp conservative pushback online.
“It’s at that point,” Solomon said, “they decide to hang a Russian shingle on Donald Trump’s campaign house.” He added that the goal was to “project their sins on Donald Trump, or whoever the Republican nominee is going to be,” and to “hang a fake Russian scandal on the Republicans to neutralize Hillary Clinton’s campaign.”
By April 2016, law firm Perkins Coie, representing Clinton’s presidential campaign, retained the intelligence firm Fusion GPS for opposition research on Trump. Fusion GPS then hired former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele to dig into Trump’s overseas business ties. That work produced the Steele dossier, which the Post’s coverage of Solomon’s remarks describes as now debunked.
In September 2016, former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann went to the FBI with computer data that purportedly linked Trump to Kremlin-linked Alfa Bank. Solomon’s account and the surrounding reporting describe that data as since debunked as well. The FBI then opened its Russia collusion investigation, an inquiry Solomon said “consumes two and a half years of America’s political conscience.”
He framed the whole arc as a Democrat-led cycle of federal investigations aimed at Trump, one that began with campaign damage control and ended as a national political fixation. Trump has continued to press related legal fights, including when Trump signaled a Supreme Court appeal after a dismissed conspiracy lawsuit tied to Hillary Clinton.
Solomon did not treat the episode as a freelanced dirty trick that stayed in campaign offices. He said the Obama administration was fully aware of what he called Clinton’s plan to foment a fake scandal against Trump.
“They know about it. Even briefed the President of the United States, Barack Obama, at the time, and nobody stops it,” Solomon 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.”
Those claims rest on Solomon’s telling. The documentation provides no separate White House memo, poll firm report, or contemporaneous briefing record to independently document the November 2015 survey rankings or the precise channel of any Obama briefing. What it does provide is Solomon’s detailed chronology and the public sequence of the Perkins Coie retention, the Steele work, Sussmann’s FBI contact, and the long investigation that followed.
Clinton’s later comments on partisan branding still draw attention on the right, including when Hillary Clinton conceded a Republican “communist” label would land hard against Democrats. Solomon’s podcast account is about an earlier chapter: how a campaign facing a Russia-linked vulnerability, in his telling, chose projection over accountability.
Solomon’s core point is institutional. A poll flagged Uranium One and Clinton-Russia ties as the largest election risk. Opposition research followed. A dossier and computer data later collapsed under scrutiny. The FBI investigation still ran for years and, in his words, seized a large share of the country’s political attention. He calls the longer pattern a “wash, rinse, repeat cycle” of federal investigations against Trump.
Voters never got a clean reckoning from the people who set that machinery in motion. They got years of headlines, a debunked dossier, discredited computer claims, and a probe that treated the Republican nominee as the Russia problem while the original Clinton vulnerability stayed off center stage. That is how trust in federal investigations erodes, when the target is chosen first and the proof is patched together after.