The Biden Administration commits an act of insanely petty retaliation against me

Every American can tour the White House. Except me and my family.

(Working on a piece about Tim Walz and Andy Slavitt… but then this happened.)

Looks like my name really is on the Biden Administration’s naughty list.

Silly me, I thought our kids would enjoy seeing the White House.

When I was eight or so, my parents took me on a tour. I was a nerdy little kid; I was pretty excited.

Back then, you could wait in line. Today, you have to reserve in advance though a Congressional office. I’d been thinking about a family August mini-vacation to Washington. After I interviewed Sen. Rand Paul in June, I asked a staffer for a tour slot in mid-August. They had none left then, but they did for late August, he told me.

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(Three years ago they censored me because I wrote stuff they didn’t like. I remember. Seems they do too. Stand with me.)

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Fine. We could build our trip around the visit. Late August it would be.

On June 20, almost 10 weeks in advance, Paul’s office put in a standard request with the White House visitors’ office for my family to visit on Aug. 27.¹ I followed up with our social security numbers and other personal information as required.

To be clear, I wasn’t asking for anything other than an ordinary tour for my family, the kind every American can take on a first-come, first-served basis.

People can only request tours between 21 and 90 days in advance, per the White House and National Park Service. So my request came early in the window on a relatively dead week, a time when many schools are already back in session.

It should have been waved through.

It wasn’t.

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(We can’t keep you off Twitter, but we can keep you out of the White House.)

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Note that they don’t really even say they don’t have room, or that I didn’t make the request in time, just that they are “unable to confirm” the tour.

Seems Aug. 27 really is a cursed day for me. (Twitter banned me on Aug. 28, 2021, but Pfizer board member Dr. Scott Gottlieb set the gears for my fifth and final strike in motion a day before on a conference call with Twitter’s two top Washington lobbyists.)

Proving anything will be next to impossible, but this sure feels like a quick and easy way for the administration to punish my family for Berenson v Biden, my federal lawsuit over the conspiracy by the White House and Pfizer to make Twitter ban me, as well as my continuing reporting on Joe Biden.

The New York Times may have stolen my scoop about the repeated visits to the White House by a neurologist over the last year. But the Biden Administration knows exactly who put the story out first.

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(I guess breaking this news is worth not having my kids see the Blue Room.)

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The 2021 censorship was serious, a fundamental violation of my rights as an American, an effort to keep you all from reading my reporting.

Not letting my family take a public tour of the White House is just stupid (and it’s going to backfire, we’re going to include it when we amend Berenson v Biden as evidence of continuing animus).

Still, it stings. I told the kids they’d get to go.

I guess I’m still naive. I had no idea how petty they really were.

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(Help me fight the petty tyrants. And the not so petty.)

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A lot of you warned me.

I should have listened.

1. Which happens to be the 20th anniversary to the day of a little adventure I had with Shia guerrillas in Najaf, Iraq. Yay! But that’s a whole ‘nother story, one I still can’t quite make myself square up and tell.