Former Wall Street Journal reporter accuses Philly’s Dechert of hacking him, getting him fired
The Journal fired Jay Solomon, chief foreign affairs correspondent, after his emails and texts with Iranian-American businessman Farhad Azi were allegedly hacked and shared with the newspaper.
A Philadelphia-based law firm is being sued by a former Wall Street Journal reporter for allegedly hacking his e-mails with a source and getting him fired.
Jonathan “Jay” Solomon — a reporter with the newspaper from 1998 to until his 2017 firing — filed the federal lawsuit on Friday against Dechert LLP, a 1,000-lawyer firm with 22 offices. He is seeking damages as a result of a number of claims including illegal hacking, conspiracy, racketeering, and “theft of highly confidential information, documents, and materials.”
Solomon was fired from his job as chief foreign affairs correspondent after e-mails and text messages between him and a source — Iranian American aviation executive Farhad Azima — were sent to his employer and other news outlets. He contends that Dechert used hackers to get the information in an attempt to win a lawsuit against Azima and, by extension, target others he had been communicating with.
The Wall Street Journal accused the reporter of being involved in prospective business deals with Azima. “I never entered into any business with Farhad Azima, nor did I ever intend to,” Solomon told the AP at the time.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, contends that the law firm engaged in a “hack-and-smear” campaign that resulted in Solomon’s being fired from his job and his journalistic integrity questioned. It names four other entities and six more individuals as defendants.
A spokesman for Dechert LLP, a multinational firm founded in 1875 in Philadelphia, said that “the claim against the firm is denied and will be defended.”
In a recent email statement, Solomon said: “This case illustrates how powerful individuals and entities can deploy vast resources and spend vast sums with the aim of silencing a journalist. It’s a trend that’s becoming a greater threat to journalism and media, as digital surveillance and hacking technologies become more sophisticated and pervasive. This is a major threat to the freedom of the press.”
In a 2018 Columbia Journalism Review article, Solomon wrote that the allegations against him were not true, but that he made some mistakes “managing his source relationship” with Azima. He described spending eight days on Azima’s yacht off the coast of Monaco during 2014 and 2015 with Azima’s family and friends, including “Iranian oilmen, former U.S. and European intelligence agents, and relatives of famous Arab arms merchants.”
The conversations, he wrote, focused on Iran’s nuclear program, and the West’s frantic efforts to curb it.