Hill reporter who helped Giuliani smear Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch gets scathing rebuke by former employer

John Solomon, the former columnist at The Hill whose work helped lead to the ouster of former American ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, was given a scathing rebuke by his former employer this week.

The Hill on Wednesday finally published its review of Solomon's columns that were part of a coordinated smear campaign against Yovanovitch and found that he failed to make several key disclosures about his sources of information, while also working to muddy the waters of opinion writing and hard news reporting.

Among other things, the review takes Solomon to task for the trust he placed in Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, who made false claims about Yovanovitch giving Ukrainian officials a list of people whom they were supposedly not allowed to prosecute.

"Most notably, Lutsenko's story has changed repeatedly," The Hill writes in its review. "In April 2019, he told a Ukrainian newspaper that he himself had reached for pen and paper and asked Ambassador Yovanovitch for the do-not-prosecute list. He altered his comments again, in an interview with The New Yorker in November, when he said that he'd written the list himself, then ripped it up while Yovanovitch looked on."

The Hill also takes Solomon to task for using his own lawyers as sources for his columns without disclosing that they were his legal representatives.

"In addition, Solomon wrote several news articles for The Hill in 2017 that quoted Toensing but did not disclose that she was his attorney," the review states. "In November 2019, Solomon said that diGenova and Toensing were his longtime lawyers during an appearance on Fox News. Pressed on why he did not disclose in his writings that Toensing was his attorney, Solomon initially denied he had quoted her while she served as his attorney and then said he would look into it and that if he did write about her, he should disclose the relationship."

Read the entire review here.