Conservative commentator John Solomon’s dual role as both a special government employee in the Trump administration and a media figure covering election integrity is drawing scrutiny from ethics experts, who say there are few meaningful guardrails governing the unusual arrangement.
Solomon, the founder, CEO, and editor-in-chief of Just the News, announced in mid-June that he would be joining the Trump administration as a special government employee “to help the government identify some documents, some secrets, some things you should know about when it comes to weaponization, election integrity, and other things.” A White House official told the Washington Examiner that Solomon is part of a “task force on government transparency and election integrity.”
Solomon’s work for Trump has also extended beyond advising behind the scenes. Solomon was involved in crafting President Donald Trump’s primetime address last week that outlined alleged vulnerabilities in U.S. election systems — many of which Solomon and Just the News had previously reported on. Solomon also covered the topic during prior stints at the Hill and Fox News.
And while Solomon has temporarily stepped down from his role as editor-in-chief, he’s continued to cover election integrity for the site, in addition to on his podcast, John Solomon Reports, and the daily news program he co-hosts with Just the News White House correspondent Amanda Head on Real America’s Voice.
That overlap, ethics experts say, creates an unusual conflict between serving in government and reporting on the same subject.
“I think there’s a pretty clear and pretty obvious conflict of interest here,” said Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, vice president of policy and government affairs for the nonpartisan, nonprofit Project on Government Oversight.
“Being on this task force related to a specific topic that he is also very intimately involved in for his outside employment — that’s where it starts to get troubling from our standpoint,” he said. “Is he using any nonpublic information that he may have gained access to on the government side of his current role to help, or to drive, or to otherwise inform his private sector work?”
Hedtler-Gaudette noted that the special government employee arrangement is not a problem that’s unique to the Trump administration. He said the Biden administration similarly used the tactic to “get whoever they want to into the government, to do things they want to do without having to go through all the pesky processes of appointing people, and running them through the confirmation process, or hiring them on a full-time basis, and dealing with the meritocratic process.”
Some of the information highlighted during Trump’s election integrity address had already appeared in reporting by Just the News weeks earlier, including allegations that China accessed millions of Americans’ voter registration records.
Following the speech, however, Solomon acknowledged to MS Now that acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte and other intelligence officials had found “zero evidence” that votes had been changed, by a foreign actor or otherwise, in the 2020, 2022, or 2024 elections. Solomon did say that he and other task force members are “still researching” the issue.
The second Trump administration has made use of special government employees at a higher rate than administrations past, the most prominent of which was Elon Musk, who oversaw the Department of Government Efficiency last year.
A White House official told the Washington Examiner that Solomon is “in line with special government employee guidelines” and “engaged with White House officials directly” on the “need to manage any potential conflicts.” The official reiterated that “White House Ethics works consistently with all staff to ensure compliance with [Office of Government Ethics] policies.”
Davis Ingle, a spokesman for the White House, told the Washington Examiner that “President Trump and millions of Americans agree that we must have integrity in our elections, otherwise we have no country at all,” adding that “Congress should immediately pass the SAVE America Act.”
Patrick Shepherd, a press liaison for the Office of Government Ethics, declined to comment on Solomon’s hiring, as the office “does not respond to questions about specific individuals.”
The Office of Government Ethics “is committed to transparency and citizen oversight of government,” he wrote. It “publishes ethics disclosures, associated documents, and oversight correspondence to its website as soon as practicable.”
Peter Loge, the director of George Washington University’s Project on Ethics in Political Communication, told the Washington Examiner that Solomon serving on the election integrity task force gives the perception of a conflict.
“He’s a political commentator with his own platform, promoting the findings of an investigation that already has ideas about,” he said in an interview. “You’re not just inviting the fox into the hen house. You’re giving the fox Old Bay sauce and a YouTube channel. This is, of course, ridiculous.”
Solomon and Just the News declined to say who is running the site in Solomon’s stead. They also did not answer questions about whether Solomon is still serving as CEO or how the site is handling reporting on information made public by the task force Solomon is leading.
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Despite the apparent concerns regarding Solomon’s role, Loge told the Washington Examiner that critics are essentially “yelling into the void.”
Loge noted that ethics rules shift from administration to administration and that the use of special government employee designations allows any administration to skirt certain government ethics requirements by withholding public disclosure filings, a critique frequently pointed to by ethics experts.
Hedtler-Gaudette expressed some optimism that there is a bipartisan movement to hold officials accountable for ethics violations and address special government employee “loopholes,” but he noted the problem is political more than anything else.
“We’ve seen it across administrations, across parties, the same conduct,” he said. “So we find ourselves in this constant rinse-and-repeat cycle, where you care a lot about it if it’s the other team, so to speak, and then you care less about it if it’s your team, and then it just basically undermines the credibility of any of the arguments that get made at any given point.”
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
