John Solomon on an Intelligence Tip, Unmasking and Michael Flynn

Many people approached, most of the people

that have approached me, and I probably

I'm sure with Sara, have good intentions. They want to get a story out.

They think they have one.

Have you ever been approached in an unusual way?

Oh, I, I'll tell you a story about a mailbox, uh,

which occurred at my home.

It's, it's, it's seminal to the, the Russia story.

Sara and I had just begun-

Mm-hmm

... working on what we called the NSA abuse

stories at-

Yeah, the unmaskings

... at where we were working, and unmasking.

And we had just gone on television on Sean's show, Sean Hannity's show,

that night.

We talked about this sudden rise in unmaskings.

And I came, I drove home, I got to my mailbox, pulled in my car.

There was a blue sedan sitting outside the mailbox, and there were two gentlemen,

clearly intelligence officers, somewhere from the government.

They never identified their names. And they stepped out and said,

"Are you Mr.

Solomon?" I said, "Yes." They said, "We just saw you on Sean Hannity's show.

We wanted to talk to you for a second.

We can't tell you much, because most of what we know

is classified.

But we will tell you this. If you keep digging, you will find out

that the United States intelligence community was used for a political

opposition

research project, and we are deeply concerned." And I said, "Well,

why are you

concerned?" "We need these tools, things like FISIM and the

NSA, to catch bad guys. And if we misuse it for political dirty

tricks,

we won't have those tools when the next terrorist attack

or the next spy-

That's right

... shows up in town. We need you to go find out what happened."

And that's all

they told me. That's how we got started into really

understanding this is much

bigger than just an unmasking scandal.

It was, it was huge.

How long ago was this?

Oh, was that 2000-

Early on?

March of 2017

... 17. Yeah, March 2017. 'Cause we'd already been working

on the stories.

Right.

I mean, we were getting tipped off.

We saw what was happening to General Flynn, Lieutenant General Mike Flynn.

I remember being approached by, let's say,

federal law enforcement officers, uh, who had told me, "You

really need to dig into what's happened to, um, Lieutenant General Flynn.

Uh, apparently, uh, there's a lot been going on inside the

FBI. Look at Andrew McCabe. Focus on some of these

characters." It was the same thing that happened to John.

I started focusing in and just really s- taking a step back, saying,

"What's going on here?" And the more we started to

investigate, little by little we started peeling back

what we

call the onion, right?

Yeah.

The layers of the onion.

You called it.

It really felt like that. So then I think, "It can't get much worse

than this." It can't get much worse than this.

Was, was General Flynn set up?

I absolutely believe that General Flynn was a target

from the very beginning.

'Cause the Obama generals didn't like him.

That's absolutely true.

The Obama intelligence. Is that correct?

Yeah.

Their intelligence.

Absolutely.

And if you keep in mind, if you look back at that time, he

was talking about a

massive reorganization of the intelligence community.

That's right.

There are a lot of powerful constituencies in the intelligence community that like

the status quo, and he was talking about reorganizing that.

And I think he had a target on his back, and opportunity struck.

A lieutenant general who spent 33 years of his life dedicated to

this nation, and they just basically destroyed this

man's life.

They turned his life upside down. But I knew it.

There was a purpose for that, Mark. There was a purpose.

Because

he had access to everything. This is a man that

angered the CIA,

that was head of the DIA.

He had connections all over this town.

He knew where the bodies were buried. He knew about Benghazi.

He knew how all these operations, and

President Obama and his team early on knew they had to get this

guy out of the way, and they had to get him out of the way

quick.

And, and they'd already tried-

Yeah, in his role

... to get him out of the way, and they failed,

and he became a top advisor to the

President of the United States.