James Rosen Recalls Obama’s DOJ Branding Him a ‘Criminal Co-Conspirator’ for Reporting the News

As President Trump’s announced ban on CNN, MS NOW and Politico at the White House draws criticism from press-freedom advocates, Newsmax on the evening of Sept. 21, 2026, resurfaced a reminder of what it looks like when the government goes after a journalist with the full weight of federal law enforcement. The network posted a “flashback” segment in which its correspondent James Rosen recounts how Barack Obama’s Justice Department labeled him a criminal co-conspirator for doing his job.

The episode is more than a decade old. It has never stopped being relevant, because it remains the clearest modern case of Washington treating news gathering itself as a crime.

A North Korea scoop and a secret affidavit

In 2009, Rosen, then covering the State Department for Fox News, reported that North Korea was likely to answer new United Nations sanctions with another nuclear test. The Justice Department opened a leak investigation. Its target was Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, a State Department contractor whom prosecutors accused of passing classified information to Rosen.

In May 2010, a federal magistrate judge approved a warrant for Rosen’s personal emails. As NBC News reported when the documents surfaced in May 2013, the government’s application described Rosen as “an aider and abettor and/or co-conspirator.” The FBI affidavit went further, saying Rosen had cultivated Kim as a source “[m]uch like an intelligence officer would run a clandestine intelligence source.”

CBS News reported that agents tracked Rosen’s movements in and out of the State Department, searched his personal emails and combed through his phone records. Court filings also showed the department obtained records for several Fox News phone lines in the network’s Washington bureau, and one listed number matched the home phone of Rosen’s parents on Staten Island, according to Fox News. The U.S. attorney’s office insisted it did not wiretap any reporter’s phones or track the calls of any reporter’s parents.

Rosen was never charged. Kim pleaded guilty in February 2014 to a single leak count under the Espionage Act and faced 13 months in prison.

Rosen’s account

In the Newsmax segment, Rosen told host Rob Schmitt that he had been told the administration’s concern “was not that the reporting was false, but that it was true and it cut too close for them.”

“They had an FBI agent swear out an affidavit and submit it to a federal judge secretly that labeled me a criminal co-conspirator in a violation of the Espionage Act of 1917 for publishing classified information, which is something that Bob Woodward had been doing more or less every day for decades,” he said.

He noted that the Nixon administration never gave that designation to the New York Times reporter who published the Pentagon Papers, which Rosen described as 7,000 pages of classified information. And he described the scope of the search: “not only did they rummage through my G-mails and my phone records, but they rummaged through 19 phone lines associated with me, including my parents’ phone records on Staten Island at the time.” The figure of 19 lines is Rosen’s; contemporaneous reporting described “several” Fox News numbers.

The irony that followed was not lost on him. Rosen recalled that Obama later gave a speech at National Defense University saying he was troubled by the idea of criminalizing a working reporter, and that the review of the department’s media guidelines was put in the hands of Attorney General Eric Holder, who, in Rosen’s words, “had already acknowledged that he was responsible for this unprecedented designation of a reporter.”

Holder’s involvement is on the record. Pressed in May 2013, the Justice Department acknowledged that the warrant decision was vetted “at the highest levels of the Department, including discussions with the Attorney General.”

What Rosen said about Trump

Rosen did not use the segment to give the current White House a pass, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Asked by Schmitt how he squares that experience with the Trump administration’s own clashes with the press, he said he was surprised that an administration that prides itself on a “smash-mouth approach” to the press was instead “tossing reporters and outlets out of the arena and declining to take them on.” His advice, in effect, was to fight them in the briefing room rather than shut the door.

That is a fair argument, and a reasonable one. On Sept. 18, Trump announced on Truth Social that he was banning CNN, Politico and MS NOW from the White House, calling their coverage “fiction and lies” and warning that other outlets could follow.

The difference that matters

But there is a difference in kind, not degree, between the two cases. Losing a seat in the briefing room is a fight over access, and it is fought in public, by some of the best-funded media companies in the country, with every lawyer and courtroom available to them. What happened to Rosen was secret: a sworn affidavit before a judge calling a reporter a likely criminal, a search of his private email, phone records reaching his parents’ home, and no notice until years later.

Today an access fight is being argued as a First Amendment case. The press had a far graver assault to cover in 2013. The story faded anyway, and by Rosen’s account the official who approved the warrant was the one put in charge of reviewing the rules.

Pulling a press pass is a fight over access, but secretly branding a reporter a criminal co-conspirator is treating journalism as a crime, and that happened under Obama.

Editor’s note: This article covers events from 2009 to 2014 and an archival Newsmax interview with James Rosen that drew renewed attention in September 2026.

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