President Donald Trump’s close adviser, political commentator John Solomon, stands accused of selectively publicizing official documents in order to spread misleading information that his boss wishes to disseminate, according to reporting by The New York Times.

“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 Times’ Charlie Savage on Sunday in his report. “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 wrote that 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.”

“Most facts were already known or minutiae, and mainstream reporters ignored the files when the White House posted them on Monday,” he added. “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.’”

The records trace back to a criminal case that never reached trial: the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 and recovered more than 100 documents marked classified; special counsel Jack Smith indicted Trump in June 2023 on charges of willfully retaining national defense information and obstructing efforts to recover them; Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the case in July 2024 on the ground that Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional; and the prosecution was dropped after Trump won the 2024 election, under Justice Department policy against indicting a sitting president.

That arc — a Friday briefing, a Monday release, an Oval Office question by Wednesday — is the report’s core account: government paperwork posted publicly for anyone to read, reinterpreted by allies through the conservative information ecosystem until it comes back to the president as fuel for the ‘weaponization’ theme. The label itself has history: Trump and his allies have spent years using “weaponization” to describe federal scrutiny of Trump, and House Republicans created a subcommittee dedicated to the issue in 2023.

The episode is not the first time White House call-log disclosures have drawn scrutiny. In 2022, it emerged that more than seven hours of phone calls were missing from the White House logs kept on Jan. 6, 2021, during the attack on the U.S. Capitol.

“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, the founder of the conservative outlet Just the News, for his part, has previously been involved in controversies connected to the Trump White House. He is described as a longtime election denier who participated in Trump’s 2020-2021 insurrection. Trump economist and fellow election denier Peter Navarro, while describing the work of the election-denial community to pro-Trump commentator and informal adviser Steve Bannon, characterized 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.”