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The treatment of me by the @BarackObama and @JoeBiden White Houses is the subject of misinformation on this and other platforms on nearly an hourly basis. I see it every day of my life. An earlier thread involving the X accounts posted below, regrettably, marks no exception.… pic.twitter.com/39Shrq2HnH

— James Rosen (@JamesRosenTV) June 26, 2025

The treatment of me by the
@BarackObama
and
@JoeBiden
White Houses is the subject of misinformation on this and other platforms on nearly an hourly basis. I see it every day of my life. An earlier thread involving the X accounts posted below, regrettably, marks no exception.

So, for the sake of the record:

After I published and aired a series of exclusive reports for Fox News in 2009 about North Korea—relating to its nuclear weapons program, its ballistic missile installations, and the succession plans for Kim Jong-un to be the next leader of the DPRK—the Department of Justice and the FBI, under
@BarackObama
and
@EricHolder
, launched a national security leak investigation to determine who my source(s) were. As part of the investigation, an FBI agent named Reginald Reyes swore in a sealed affidavit submitted to a federal judge that the bureau considered me to be a criminal co-conspirator in a violation of the Espionage Act of 1917.

This was unprecedented. Not even the late, great Neil Sheehan, the
@nytimes
reporter who in 1971 published the “Pentagon Papers”—roughly 7,000 pages of classified documents compiled as part of an internal @DefenseDepartment study of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia—was thusly designated by the Nixon administration.

Also as part of their investigation, DOJ/FBI subjected Fox News, members of my family, and me to illegal and intrusive surveillance measures. No less a lion of the law than Floyd Abrams, the attorney who represented the Times in the Pentagon Papers case, publicly described the Obama administration’s conduct in my case as a deprivation of civil liberties that marked the very definition of tyranny.

On May 20, 2013, the
@washingtonpost
broke the story of the novel designation of me as a criminal for doing my job—for doing what
@realBobWoodward
and many other reporters do on a daily basis.

Five days earlier, it turned out, Attorney General Holder had testified before the House Judiciary Committee that he had “never heard of” the potential prosecution of a member of the news media for the unauthorized disclosure of classified information; had not personally been “involved in” such matters; and would not consider such actions to be “wise policy.”

After the May 20 Post report, however, Holder, through background briefings to DOJ reporters, confirmed that he had personally approved the novel designation.

The majority Republican staff of the House Judiciary Committee later produced a formal report concluding that the attorney general’s testimony before the panel, as described above, had been false and misleading.

No effort was made thereafter, so far as I am aware, to suspend or revoke the attorney general’s law license in the District of Columbia.

Coverage of “the Rosen case” dominated the news for some time (until disclosures about Eric Snowden swept me off the front pages). Briefly I out-trended my fellow celebrities Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift.

In a speech at National Defense University, President Obama, without mentioning me by name but looking to quell the furor that had erupted around my case, pronounced himself “troubled” by the notion of a working reporter being criminalized for doing his job.

To figure out how this egregious turn of events had come about, and to prevent future recurrences, the president appointed a task force to review the procedures in DOJ/FBI national security leak investigations, and placed in charge of it—Eric Holder. By July of that year, procedural reforms had been enacted at DOJ.

At the end of his term in office, Holder was asked by
@CapehartJ
of
@MSNBC
at a public forum to identify the biggest regret of his tenure as the nation's highest law enforcement official. Holder said it was the “subpoena on the Fox reporter, uhhh, Rosen.”

In fact, there was never a subpoena in my case; had there been one, I would have known about the efforts to review my personal data. Such courtesies were studiously avoided in the probe into the Fox News reporter.

I did, however, enjoy the added touch of Holder pretending he scarcely remembered my name. He and I had met on at least two occasions prior to this episode; he had introduced me to his family. We had talked about my 2008 biography of former Attorney General John Mitchell, who served nineteen months in federal prison for his role in the Watergate cover-up. Holder had even whipped out a pen to write down the title of the book (“The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate”). When he finished writing that down, he told me: “That’s not an example I hope to follow.”

He knew my name. He also knew it hadn’t been a subpoena. But I take at face value his identification of his illegal conduct in my case as his greatest regret from his time in office.
Less well remembered than the North Korea probe is the fact that the Obama administration also violated the law when it censored me.
In February 2013, I received a tip that the U.S. and Iran were engaged in direct talks. I attended the State Department press briefing and put the question directly to Victoria Nuland, then the State Department spokeswoman. She answered flatly in the negative.

That October, the administration announced with great fanfare that it had, in concert with the other members of the so-called P5 + 1, successfully negotiated the framework for a nuclear deal with Iran. In background briefings providing greater detail on how the diplomacy had begun and progressed, it was clear that my source had been correct back in February, and that Nuland had spoken falsely from the podium.

So I returned to the briefing room that October to confront the spokeswoman at that time, Jen Psaki, with the transcript of my earlier exchange with Nuland. I had known Psaki well, in a professional sense, at this point—since the 2008 campaign.

After eight minutes of desultory back-and-forth (with Psaki providing answers to the effect of “I don’t have anything new for you on the Iran talks”), I finally asked if it was the policy of the Obama administration that it is permissible, where the preservation of the secrecy of secret negotiations is concerned, to lie to the public.

Paski replied that there were times when diplomacy required privacy, and this was one of them. That drew wide media coverage, because it amounted to an acknowledgment that Nuland, Psaki’s predecessor, had provided false statements from the podium.

In 2016, a Fox News producer, Guerin Hays, informed me that on the official State Department website where the videos of State Department press briefings were maintained, the video for the October 2013 briefing had been edited: Where the eight-minute exchange between Psaki and me was supposed to appear, the viewer instead saw a white flash, deleting the entirety of the exchange. On either side of the white flash, Psaki’s head could be seen moving abruptly, clearly spliced.

This official effort at deletion—which is to say, at censorship, the deletion of official history—was puzzling, because every major news organization had in its possession the same video of the October briefing. Disclosure of the deletion again prompted widespread media coverage.

Two investigations were conducted at the State Department. One was conducted by the press office and the spokesman by that point, Admiral John Kirby, who went on “Fox and Friends” to express his regret about the situation, and his admiration for me as a reporter. The second was conducted by what State Department insiders call “L”: the office of the legal counselor.

According to what I was told at the time, the investigations turned up an older lady who worked at State—a career civil servant, what :::Tom Wolfe::: would have called “a lifer”—and whose job it was, on a daily basis, to upload the video files of the press briefings to the relevant page on the State Department website. This lady reportedly told investigators that she recalled receiving a phone call from a female superior who mentioned “James Rosen,” “Fox News,” and “Iran,” and who ordered the deletion of my exchange with Psaki and the placement of the white flash instead—but, for the life of her, The Lifer, scared to death of losing her job, could not recall the superior’s name…For the record, I do not believe the female superior in question was Jen Psaki.

But be clear about what transpired in this instance: The technician who operated the State Department camera at the Psaki briefing was a federal employee. The camera used was federal equipment. The file created was a federal record. The lady performing the uploads was a federal employee, using federal equipment to do so. The relevant web page was a federal record, as well. The Federal Records Act of 1950, and other applicable laws, make it a felony to tamper with federal records.

In time, the missing eight minutes were restored to the relevant web page. As far as I know, no criminal referrals were made in connection with the illegal act(s) committed in this illegal censorship project.

Then there is the Biden administration, which did not ban me, physically, but rather banned me from asking questions in the White House briefing room, from participating in background conference calls with senior officials, from in-person background briefings, and from performing other essential aspects of my job.

Psaki and her successor as White House press secretary during the Biden term, Karine Jean-Pierre, blackballed me from asking any questions in the briefing room foreight months after I posed my now-famous question to President Biden, about mounting concerns over his cognitive fitness, as reflected in polling data, on January 19, 2022.

Another such freeze-out of me in the Jean-Pierre era lasted six months; and then I was blackballed for the final fourteen months of the Biden administration.

My last briefing room exchange with Jean-Pierre was in November 2023, when I asked about the legitimacy of all the negative polling data engulfing President Biden: his dismal job-approval ratings, underwater for two-plus years at that point; his low marks from the electorate in general, and even from Democrats, on foreign policy, domestic policy, and whether he should seek re-election. In response, Jean-Pierre declared for the first time that the White House did not challenge the accuracy of all that data and then added, to the astonishment of everyone in the room: “We are not going to change the minds of Americans. I get that.”

That’s why I wasn’t called on to ask a single question in a single briefing for the last fourteen months of the Biden presidency.

The blackballing by Psaki and Jean-Pierre forced me to practice, in the briefings, what I call The Art of Interjection. Often, Jean-Pierre’s response to this tactic was to denounce me from the podium as rude—when in fact, it was her and the administration’s treatment of me and selected other reporters as second-class citizens that was rude.

I have been covering Washington and/or the White House since 1999. I used to see press secretaries from both parties routinely call on reporters from outlets they didn’t like, or on reporters they didn’t like. The idea of blackballing for a single week, let alone for months at a time or for more than a year, someone who meets all the relevant criteria—is a member in good standing, as I have been, more or less continuously since 2000, of the White House Correspondents Association; has a dedicated seat in the briefing room; shows up to the complex every day; and conducts himself in a respectful way—was unheard of until the Biden administration.

To intervene to try to mitigate or bring an end to this egregious conduct by the Biden White House, the White House Correspondents Association, despite confirming receipt of my annual dues, lifted not a finger, issued not a peep of official protest, even after I sought the organization’s assistance.

So the Biden team broke norms in my case; the Obama team broke multiple laws in two separate cases involving me; WHCA broke bread.

Those are the facts. I don’t expect everyone on X to recall them all; but I do expect seasoned reporters, especially those who cover the news media or who presume to pronounce publicly on what happened in my cases, to have some grasp of them.

We now return to our regularly-scheduled programming.