President Donald Trump speaks to the press aboard Air Force One en route to the U.S. following his official visit with President Xi Jinping in China, May 15, 2026.
President Donald Trump's close adviser, political commentator John Solomon, is accused of selectively publicizing official documents in order to spread misleading information that his boss wishes to disseminate.
"On the afternoon of Friday, Oct. 2, the White House invited a mix of mainstream and right-wing reporters to an online briefing about 'weaponization,'" wrote The New York Times' Charlie Savage on Sunday. "A briefer previewed records the White House planned to release from the investigation of Donald J. Trump’s retention of classified documents while out of office, and his obstruction of their retrieval."
Savage continued, "The files reflected scattered topics. Among them: an internal debate over probable cause to search Mr. Trump’s social club and residence, Mar-a-Lago; plans to execute any search warrant while Mr. Trump and his family were away; and the collection of phone logs of Mr. Trump’s top aide, Susie Wiles."
The journalist added, "Most facts were already known or minutiae, and mainstream reporters ignored the files when the White House posted them on Monday. But Trump allies pushed an alarmist and decontextualized interpretation through the conservative information ecosystem. By Wednesday, a reporter from Trump ally and MyPillow founder Mike Lindell’s website asked Mr. Trump about it in the Oval Office. The president thanked her for the question, denouncing the inquiry as 'weaponization.'"
This is not the first time the White House has had a story involving call log disclosure. In 2022, it came out that Trump had omitted more than seven hours of phone calls from the White House logs during the coup attempt on Jan. 6, 2021.
"The lack of an official White House notation of any calls placed to or by Trump for 457 minutes on Jan. 6, 2021 – from 11:17 a.m. to 6:54 p.m. – means the committee has no record of his phone conversations as his supporters descended on the Capitol, battled overwhelmed police and forcibly entered the building, prompting lawmakers and Vice President Mike Pence to flee for safety," The Washington Post reported at the time.
Solomon has also been previously involved in controversies with the Trump White House. He is a longtime election denier who participated in Trump's 2020-2021 insurrection. Trump economist and fellow election denier Peter Navarro, when describing the work of the denier community to pro-Trump commentator and informal adviser Steve Bannon, described Solomon as part of a larger group that pushes Trump's narratives about the 2020 election.
“This is what's so wrong, Steve, with just about every journalist and outlet except War Room,” Navarro told Bannon at the time. “It's like they won't deal with the hard truth about what happened in 2020. And so we're gonna keep working it and [pro-Trump John] Solomon is gonna do what Solomon does, keep getting more and more truth. [Sen. Chuck] Grassley [R-IA] is doing a great job at the Senate side. I don't know what happened to [Rep.] Jim [Jordan, R-OH]. He has been so unhelpful in so many ways with that gavel in his hand, but we're gonna put this little heat on there to get some stuff done. “
