This afternoon I spoke to the Washington Post's Susan Glasser, the paper's assistant managing editor for national news, about John Solomon's hiring.

Glasser was unwaveringly positive about Solomon, citing his "great mind, enthusiasm, zeal for an important subject" -- money in politics -- and calling him "one of the most distinctive assets that the Post has gained in the past few years."

She declined to discuss criticism of his reporting on incoming Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV). She "wasn't involved in those stories," she said, and didn't "have anything to say about them." She confirmed that concerns over his work on those stories was "not at all" an issue in his hiring, and emphasized that Solomon is an "extremely well-regarded, practiced, thoughtful, responsible, agressive reporter."

"You guys should be out there reading him closely and carefully, but this is a good thing, an exciting thing for us," Glasser added.

Glasser said that Solomon will be "a reporter covering money in politics" at the Post and will not be getting his own investigative unit, as stated in an AP internal memo about the hiring. "He’s going to be a reporter here at the Post, although I imagine a leader of our coverage," she said.

So there you have it. Don't worry, Susan, we will be reading him closely.

Allow us to ride our Solomon hobby horse a little more.

Yesterday, not long after The Washington Post announced that it had snagged the AP's John Solomon -- citing, among other things, his courageous exposure of Sen. Harry Reid's "ethical missteps," -- news came that the Senate ethics committee had cleared Reid for accepting free ringside seats from the Nevada Athletic Commission.

That ethics complaint, of course, had been spurred by one of Solomon's hit pieces on Reid, and the one, to our judgment, most riddled with inaccuracies and omissions that served to pump up Solomon's rather lame story.

But who doesn't get cleared by the congressional ethics committees nowadays?

Most interesting to us was the AP's story on the decision, which was written by the AP's Erica Werner -- not Solomon.

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From a chat at washingtonpost.com this morning with the Post's White House reporter Peter Baker:

Rochester, N.Y.: I'm sure you won't take this one, but it's worth a shot: is anyone in the newsroom concerned about the fact that the Post is hiring John Solomon (formerly of the AP), whose pieces on Harry Reid were widely criticized, not only in the blogosphere but also by media critics (such as your own Howard Kurtz)? Does his hiring mean we can look forward to more RNC-inspired hit pieces on Democratic leaders?

I'll bet your getting a lot of questions like this today. And I'll bet you won't take any of them.

Peter Baker: Old trick: "I bet you won't take this question cuz you're scared, nyah, nyah." (And by the way, glad to welcome back our friend in Rochester to these chats.) But the serious answer to your question is everyone I've talked with in the newsroom is absolutely thrilled that John Solomon is joining us from the Associated Press. John is one of the marquee names in political journalism and he's going to help us build the best accountability team in the business going into the 2008 election cycle. Has he been criticized by partisans in the blogosphere? Personally, I don't know, but who hasn't been? He wouldn't be doing his job as an investigative journalist if he didn't make some people squirm. John and the team he's led at the Associated Press have broken a lot of important stories without regard to political party; in addition to the ethical missteps of Senator Reid, he and his team exposed the Dubai ports deal that caused a huge civil war within the Republican party and uncovered the videotape showing what President Bush was told about Hurricane Katrina before it hit.

Many things I could point out about this response (nothing easier than painting critics with the broad brush of partisanship), but I'll settle for this: Baker, listing Solomon's accomplishments, notes the Dubai ports deal and the pre-Katrina Bush tape, both indisputably big stories, together with Solomon's stories on Reid. The paper also did this in their press release on the hiring.

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A bit more about John Solomon, the long-time Associated Press investigative reporter who's been hired away by the Washington Post.

As we've catalogued here on TPMm and at TPM, Solomon -- a Washington-based muckraker -- likes to do hard-hitting pieces that expose corruption and wrongdoing among the government's elite. That much we applaud. However, a number of his pieces feature key distortions and omissions that serve to pump their conclusions up to the edge of what may have been supportable by the facts.

Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) has been a favorite target of Solomon's this past year. In February, Solomon wrote a story pulling the senior Democrat into the Abramoff mess. The piece repeatedly mentioned that an Abramoff associate lobbying Reid. Yet he did not mention that Reid voted against the measure Abramoff's team was pushing.

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As Josh just noted, John Solomon will be moving to The Washington Post, according to an internal AP memo leaked to TPM. The memo, which comes to us from a reliable source, reads:

John Solomon is departing at year's end for the Washington Post, where he will run an investigative unit. John has been a reporter, a news editor and investigative editor here over the last 15 years. His own reporting and his work with other Washington reporters has won awards and praise for the AP. We wish him well in his new challenge.

Our calls to the Post, the Associated Press, and John Solomon were not immediately returned.

For those who need reminding as to Solomon's curious predilection for chasing Democrats, here's an earlier TPM post explaining. And another.

Update: AP spokesman John Stokes confirms. "John Solomon is departing at year's end for the Washington Post," he wrote to us in an email that reproduces verbatim the memo we posted above.