Fox News’s James Rosen set the record straight on Thursday after CNN's Jim Acosta made false claims about the Obama administration’s treatment of Fox News.
Acosta lamented during Thursday’s press briefing that the White House was “back to playing games and refusing to call on CNN.”
But he followed up saying that the Obama administration didn’t treat Fox News as unfairly as the Trump administration is treating CNN.
“Also worth noting... and not to belabor the issue... but the Obama WH always called on Fox at WH press briefings,” he said.
Rosen quickly jumped in to correct Acosta.
“Except when they tried to shut us out of a pool round-robin w/ Geithner and did so for the pivotal first Benghazi backgrounder,” he said.
Acosta responded, saying he was only referring to the daily press briefings.
“James.. that's unfortunate,” he said, “But as you know I'm talking about the daily briefing.”
“And as you know the @POTUS44 administration's conduct toward @FoxNews far exceeded anything the Nixon administration did to @washingtonpost,” Acosta shot back.
The Obama administration, you’ll remember, labeled Rosen a “criminal co-conspirator and a flight risk” for stories he reported on North Korea that contained sensitive information. They also sought his personal emails and phone records.
“I have to clarify that I was not wiretapped, my parents were not wiretapped, which is where you place a listening device on someone’s telephone line and you listen to their conversations,” Rosen said about the experience earlier this year. “What happened to me was that the Attorney General, Eric Holder, under Barack Obama as president secretly designated me a criminal co-conspirator and a flight risk and thereby had a federal judge give the government permission to rifle through all my gmails."
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He added: “They could read the emails, and then also to get all the phone records associated with about 20 phones that I used at that time in my reporting.”
As he mentioned in his tweet to Acosta, the targeting of him was much worse than what many reporters experienced who exposed far more than he did.
"Not even Neil Sheehan, who is the New York Times reporter back in 1971 who published the Pentagon Papers, 7,000 classified documents, was designated by the Nixon administration as a criminal co-conspirator in a violation of the Espionage Act," Rosen said in March. "So that was an honor I had all unto myself."
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