Transcription
So today, now, I want to talk about John Solomon's latest quote scoop. His claim that he's uncovered some secret surveillance by the January 6 committee. Now, spoiler, this isn't new. It isn't a scandal. It's just another case of old facts that are being recycled for clicks and outrage. But we'll get to that.
So first, to John Solomon. He is a thoroughly discredited, I guess I'll call him, a reporter. He was fired from, get this, Fox News. Fired from Fox News for his role in spreading hoaxes.
Now, I want to get to this so-called scoop. So, back in 2021, the January 6 committee subpoenaed phone companies for what we called, what's called metadata. So, it's basic info. It's who called who, when, and how long. There are no recordings. It's not spying. It's just, it's not a wiretap or anything. It's just standard investigative practice that's been used in every serious investigation for decades. Again, it just is used to build who called who and then how long they talked. That's it.
So, it was covered at the time by the Washington Post, by CNN, by CBS, by Axios, actually by everyone. You can see some of those right now. Denver Wgleman, who worked for the committee, even went on 60 Minutes to explain how it all worked, and he wrote about it in his book. So, this was public knowledge years ago.
So, fast forward to today. So, Solomon pops up claiming that he discovered this thing and that I alerted the FBI to, and this is a quote, "the mountainous collection of phone records." Wait, what? So, this widely reported fact in 2021 was somehow just revealed to the FBI in late 2023? That doesn't make sense, of course, because it's insane. But what they're doing is implying that it somehow proves that members of Congress conspired with, by the way, Trump's FBI. He was president on January 6th, but they conspired to stage January 6th or to spy on American citizens afterwards. It's ludicrous and it's fantasy. It's not wrong. It's actually just wrong. It's part of a pattern, and it's a dangerous lie.
So, this is how the right-wing outrage machine builds its stories. So, step one is you take something ordinary, a subpoena, a court filing, a document request, and you call it spying. Step two, you mix up the timeline so that it sounds like everything happened together or something that was known was discovered later. Step three, you pretend that it was hidden all along. Step four, you unleash it across media outlets that won't fact-check or don't care to fact-check it. And step five, you just let outrage do the rest. It's the same playbook we saw with all those so-called deep state claims and with so much of the misinformation we see. The goal isn't to uncover truth. It's actually to exhaust you, to confuse you, and make accountability itself seem, I don't know, suspect.
The real story here is simple. Congress did its job. The public knew. And now, four years later, bad faith actors are trying to rewrite history to make oversight look like oppression. So, don't buy it. Don't amplify it. If you hear someone pushing this quote discovery, ask them when it was first reported, because the answer is 2021, when the committee itself announced it. That's the truth. The truth doesn't need a headline written in all caps to matter.
So, thanks for watching. If you think this kind of context matters, share it. Truth is the best antidote to manufactured scandal.