Throughout the first several years of her political career, Sen. Jacky Rosen (D., Nev.) often pointed to her husband’s "everyday" service as a doctor for wounded veterans to boost her political bonafides with the military community.
Rosen had little else in her political repertoire to lean on at the time. A former computer programmer and synagogue president, Rosen had scant relevant political experience to capitalize on when former Senate majority leader Harry Reid convinced her in late 2015 to launch her first congressional campaign. Through her husband’s experience working with military veterans "every day," Rosen told voters, she gained insight into the issues affecting America’s warriors that she brought to Washington, D.C.
"My husband is a radiologist, and for the last ten years, he has worked for our VA hospital," Rosen told C-SPAN in April 2017 during her first and only term in the House. "The hospital is a little bit newer, but he’s worked for the VA system. I’m very proud of him and the work he does there and the stories he brings home from our veterans. All the ones he works with and the ones he serves every day."
It was an inspiring story that Rosen told well into her 2018 Senate campaign. On her campaign website in April of that year, she said her husband was serving as a radiologist at the Southern Nevada VA Hospital in Las Vegas. Records obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, however, show that wasn't true.
Rosen’s husband, Larry, received his last payment for services rendered to Veterans Affairs in December 2016, payroll records show. The last time Larry Rosen worked "every day" for American veterans, as Rosen claimed throughout the first several years of her political career, was in January 2014, when he abruptly relinquished his full-time position with the agency. That was one year before Rosen launched her first political campaign.
"Employee gave no reason for resignation," Larry Rosen’s personnel records show.
Nineteen months later, in August 2015, Larry Rosen resumed his employment with Veterans Affairs, but this time on an "intermittent," fee-based schedule, records obtained by the Free Beacon show. He earned $126,000 as a Veterans Affairs contractor from August 2015 through December 2016, logging no more than six billable events in any particular two-week pay period, hardly the "everyday" workload Rosen boasted to voters during an interview with CBS Las Vegas in September 2016.
"Well, you know, my husband is a doctor, and for the last ten years, has worked for the VA as a radiologist," Rosen said in that interview. "And I’m really proud of him because he serves our veterans every day and works alongside veterans in the healthcare field. He hears their stories and the stories of how they’ve protected us, protected our freedom, and the stories of the injuries they came back with."
During his part-time stint with the agency in 2015 and 2016, Veterans Affairs paid Larry Rosen at increments of $1,400 to help doctors examine and interpret X-rays and CT scans, records show. It’s unclear if Larry Rosen’s fee represented his daily rate, hourly rate, or if he earned $1,400 for every service he performed. It’s also unclear if he performed any front-facing work with veterans during those years.
"After many years of serving patients as a radiologist in private practice and then at the Southern Nevada VA hospital, Dr. Rosen transitioned to a part-time role with the VA and has since retired," a Rosen campaign spokesperson told the Free Beacon. "He is proud of the work he did to support the VA’s mission and help ensure Nevada veterans received the medical care they needed." The campaign did not clarify why Rosen claimed her husband worked with veterans "every day" during the timeframes he worked intermittently in 2015 and 2016 and not at all in 2017 and 2018.
Larry Rosen’s part-time stint with Veterans Affairs appears to have correlated with Rosen’s political career. His intermittent work with the agency began just a few months before Rosen launched her inaugural political campaign—which leaned heavily on Larry’s career—in January 2016 and ended just weeks after she won her first term in the House in November.
He also worked in the private sector during his part-time stint with Veterans Affairs. In 2015 and 2016, Larry Rosen earned income from private sector consulting gigs at Barton Associates, a medical staffing company, and CID Management, according to Rosen’s financial disclosures.
But Rosen, who once deployed attack ads against her Republican opponent for "playing politics with veterans," weaved a different tale to voters during her 2016 House campaign. Her website said in October that her husband "left his private practice to serve our veterans at the local VA hospital. For the last ten years, he’s seen their struggles almost every day."
That may have been true when Larry Rosen started his full-time position at Veterans Affairs in 2007, but it wasn’t in 2016 when he was a part-time employee juggling two additional private sector jobs. Personnel records show Larry Rosen formally relinquished his position as a Veterans Affairs contractor in December 2018 after receiving no payments throughout 2017 and 2018. He tendered his resignation just one month after Rosen won her first term in the Senate.
Rosen removed all references to her husband’s work with veterans from her campaign website by the time she launched her reelection bid in April 2023.
Rosen faces a tight reelection bid against Republican challenger Sam Brown in a race that could determine which party controls the Senate in 2025. Brown is an Army veteran who suffered third-degree burns across 30 percent of his body after a roadside bomb detonated under his vehicle in Afghanistan in 2008. Rosen has the advantage over Brown coming into September, leading him by 9.4 points in the RealClearPolitics polling average.
Rosen will be joined on the ticket by Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz, who is facing allegations of "stolen valor" from combat veterans over his characterization of his 24-year career in the National Guard. Walz retired from the National Guard during his first run for Congress in 2005 after receiving notice his unit would likely be deployed to the Middle East, the Free Beacon reported. But Walz represented himself as a veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom during his inaugural campaign and later claimed in 2018 that he carried weapons "in war" despite never serving in a combat zone.