Frank Parlato
Frank A. Rose spent three decades in national security in four presidential administrations — Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Biden. Under President Obama, he was appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Space and Defense Policy and confirmed by the Senate as Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control, the third-ranking position in the Bureau of Arms Control.
In 2021, President Biden nominated him to be Principal Deputy Administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration. The FBI cleared him. The Senate confirmed him by voice vote. He was trusted with the United States’ nuclear arsenal.
The President of the United States trusted Rose with the nuclear arsenal. The Senate agreed. The FBI found him clean. Yet Rose found he could be ousted by a handful of agency officials acting on unsubstantiated allegations they never investigated, on the word of an accuser they never challenged, without giving Rose an interview.
The Department Rose Walked Into
During the Biden administration, the Department of Energy and NNSA had adopted ideological preoccupations that made this not only possible but inevitable.
These preoccupations had nothing to do with its mission of designing, building, and maintaining the most destructive weapons on earth.
It started early with heartbreak.
In late 2021, the Senate killed Build Back Better — Biden’s multitrillion-dollar social spending bill covering climate programs, childcare subsidies, and expanded healthcare. Build Back Better had nothing to do with nuclear weapons.
But political appointees at DOE — the agency responsible for the nuclear arsenal — were in tears over its failure as though they worked at the Department of Health and Human Services. Rather than telling them to refocus on the mission of keeping the country safe, the DOE–White House Liaison staff asked whether they needed “mental health support.”
Rose had served in multiple administrations under both parties. He had never seen anything like it. These were the people entrusted with nuclear weapons, crying about a social spending bill, and being offered therapy.
Then came Sam Brinton. DOE appointed Brinton — a biological male who identified as non-binary and was celebrated for appearing at official functions in women’s clothing, stiletto heels, and full makeup — as Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Office of Nuclear Energy. Press releases heralded the hire as a milestone of inclusion. The department threw its arms around Brinton as proof that the nuclear enterprise had evolved.
Brinton was later arrested twice for stealing women’s luggage from airport baggage carousels, in Minneapolis and Las Vegas. The stolen bags contained thousands of dollars’ worth of women’s designer clothing and accessories. Brinton was not collecting souvenir luggage. He was stealing women’s clothes to wear. One victim, a Tanzanian fashion designer, said a bag containing irreplaceable garments worth $3,670 was taken. Brinton was caught on surveillance video walking off with it.
This was a man whom the Department of Energy had vetted, hired, celebrated, and paraded before the press as the face of progress, while he was stealing women’s clothing out of suitcases in airports.
This was the environment in which Frank Rose served.
The Sneha Nair Hire
When NNSA leadership requested a junior political appointee for the Office of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation, Rose recommended Ariel Higuchi, a former colleague from Brookings who was capable, serious, and mission-focused. Higuchi understood the nuclear mission. She was the kind of person a country would want working on nonproliferation — someone who took the work seriously and understood that the job was about keeping nuclear weapons out of the wrong hands.
Rose was overruled. The Secretary’s office selected Sneha Nair, a researcher at the Stimson Center who had co-authored an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists titled “Queering Nuclear Weapons: How LGBTQ+ Inclusion Strengthens Security and Reshapes Disarmament.”
In the article, Nair argued that the nuclear policy community was too dominated by straight men — “cis-heteronormative,” in her language — and that this produced “groupthink” that perpetuated dangerous ideas like deterrence and crisis stability.
The strategy that has prevented nuclear war for eighty years, the foundation of American national security since Hiroshima, to Nair, was a symptom of a male-dominated culture that needed to be dismantled through the application of queer theory.
She argued that queer theory should “shift the perception of nuclear weapons as instruments for security” — that the $60 billion the United States spends annually on its arsenal should instead go to “education, infrastructure, and welfare.” This was not an argument for better nuclear policy. It was an argument against having nuclear weapons at all.
Nair cited Ashli Babbitt, the Air Force veteran killed at the Capitol on January 6, who had previously worked at a nuclear power plant, as evidence that nuclear facilities needed “thorough social media analysis by personnel reliability programs.” The implication was that people with conservative political views should be treated as insider threats to nuclear security, screened and surveilled the same way you would screen for espionage or sabotage.
Babbitt worked as a security guard at Calvert Cliffs nuclear power plant from 2015 to 2017. She caused no security incident. She committed no offense. She did her job and left. Her political radicalization, such as it was, occurred years later, after she had moved to California and left the nuclear industry. She was killed at the Capitol four years after her last day at the nuclear plant.
Nair used a dead woman who had never threatened nuclear security in any way as the reason for arguing that nuclear facilities should conduct “thorough social media analysis” of their workers, meaning that holding conservative political views should be treated as a security risk on par with espionage or sabotage. This was not nuclear policy. It was political surveillance masquerading as safety, written by a researcher who had no background in nuclear security and published in a journal that had abandoned serious science for progressive advocacy.
Nair’s position was that the nuclear arsenal was the problem, that the men who maintained it were the problem, and that people with the wrong politics should be purged from the enterprise.
This was the person DOE Secretary Jennifer Granholm’s office chose over Ariel Higuchi.
The New York Post, Newsweek, and the Heritage Foundation all covered the story.
Granholm’s DOE
At DOE, Secretary Jennifer Granholm spent more time engaging with DOE’s Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion office than with NNSA or the nuclear weapons complex. She mandated diversity plans from every DOE office. Under her leadership, the department operated less like a national security agency and more like a women’s studies department with a budget and a stockpile.
The senior ranks were filled with women who owed their positions to Granholm’s patronage. The DEI apparatus was run by women. The culture that treated an accusation from a woman as a conviction, that treated the accused man’s right to be heard as an inconvenience, was built by a woman. Jennifer Granholm.
The woman in charge of the American nuclear arsenal — the warheads, the submarines, the laboratories, the sixty thousand people across the country who keep the deterrent alive was more interested in diversity programming than in deterrence. She had one goal: to be Lady Granholm, the progressive icon, the cabinet secretary who transformed DOE into a showcase for the Biden administration’s social agenda. The nuclear mission was an afterthought, something that happened in New Mexico and Tennessee while she was in Washington, hosting equity summits and collecting magazine profiles.
The nuclear weapons complex — Los Alamos, Sandia, Lawrence Livermore, Pantex, the Y-12 National Security Complex, and the Savannah River Site — is where the actual work of keeping the country safe gets done. Granholm treated them as props in her personal branding campaign. The scientists, engineers, and technicians who maintain the arsenal need a Secretary of Energy who understands that their work is the most consequential thing the department does. They got a Secretary who understood that their work was the least interesting thing on her calendar.
She mandated DEI training for all senior managers. Rose never took it. She mandated diversity plans from every office. Rose sent his back and told his staff to focus on nuclear weapons.
Christopher Davis
The order to remove Rose came through Christopher Davis, Granholm’s chief of staff.
To understand Davis is to understand the chain of command that destroyed Rose’s career. Davis had no nuclear weapons background. He had no national security credentials. He was a political operative — congressional staff on the House Oversight and Energy and Commerce committees, then the White House Office of Legislative Affairs under Obama, then a series of political roles at DOE under Obama, then a stint at a nonprofit that advised Congress on oversight. When Biden took office, Davis returned to DOE as Granholm’s senior advisor. She promoted him to chief of staff in March 2022. When she announced the promotion, Granholm praised Davis as “smart, kind, and passionate about solving the climate crisis.”
Not the nuclear mission. Not deterrence. Not the safety of the arsenal. The climate crisis.
In press releases announcing new DOE appointees, Davis boasted that the team was “57 percent women, 56 percent people of color, and 24 percent identifying as LGBTQ+.” Those were metrics. Not warhead readiness. Not stockpile stewardship. Not whether the people knew anything about nuclear weapons. He was counting women and measuring rainbow flags.
Davis had no authority over the substance of Rose’s work because he did not understand it. But he had authority over the politics of Rose’s employment. In Granholm’s DOE, politics mattered more than anything else.
The Culture That Investigated Frank Rose
If any office embodied DOE’s ideological drift, it was the Office of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation. Staffed largely by alumni of disarmament-oriented NGOs, it was led by Corey Hinderstein, a longtime arms-control advocate.
Hinderstein added her preferred pronouns — “she/her” — to her official email signature.
Under her leadership, the office conducted DEI trainings on topics like “neurodiversity” — trainings that had no connection to the office’s mission of keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists and rogue states.
The pressure to conform came through the trainings you were expected to attend, the language you were expected to use, and the priorities you were expected to adopt. Senior leaders like Rose could push back and survive for a while. Junior and mid-level staff could not. They learned to go along or get out of the way.
Every DOE office was required to submit a formal diversity plan. This was new. Across three decades of service, Rose had never seen it. When his staff brought him a draft, he told them NNSA’s mission was designing, building, and maintaining nuclear weapons. He circulated a Wall Street Journal editorial about DEI excesses at NASA and the Smithsonian as a warning.
What he found at DOE was the opposite of genuine inclusion. In 2023, Rose met with NNSA’s HR specialists — 95 percent of whom were Black women — and asked whether they felt respected by their colleagues. The answer was immediate and emotional: no. They described patterns of mistreatment, particularly from White female employees who prominently displayed pronouns in their email signatures and were the most vocal participants in DEI activities.
A 2023 Huffington Post article confirmed a pattern: across agencies, the Biden administration’s diversity efforts had become a vehicle for advancing White women. The article described the circle with names like “the Becky Bunch” and “the Madeleine Albright group.” Several younger Black Biden national security appointees from other agencies had reached out to Rose for advice when he arrived at NNSA in 2021. They told him the same story: on January 20, 2021, they had been placed in “special assistant” positions with little guidance. When Senate-confirmed officials arrived, these appointees were told to look elsewhere because the principals already had someone in mind. Most often, it was a White woman.
Rose insisted on mission over ideology. He made enemies inside the department. If you were a man at Granholm’s DOE, you were the past that her diversity plans were designed to correct.
White men were the designated villains, the embodiment of everything the equity apparatus existed to dismantle. Men kept their heads down, did their work, and learned not to push back because pushing back meant resisting change, which in Granholm’s DOE was a career death sentence. The smart ones made themselves invisible. The ambitious ones learned to mouth the right phrases, put pronouns in their email signatures, attend the trainings, and never question whether any of it had anything to do with nuclear weapons.
The department’s equity infrastructure was supposedly built for people who looked like Frank Rose. But in practice, the system existed to advance White women. The DEI machinery celebrated Black faces in brochures while discarding Black professionals in practice.
When the time came to choose between investigating the accusations against Rose and simply getting rid of him, the DOE had no reason to protect a man who had spent three years refusing to play along.
The Woman Behind the Story
Kathryn “Kate” Hewitt worked at the Brookings Institution under Rose from 2018 to 2019 as a research assistant. Her desk was in an open bullpen. Adam Twardowski and Ariel Higuchi sat in adjacent cubicles. Mike O’Hanlon, the co-director of the Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology, had an office next to Rose’s. None of them ever raised a concern about Rose’s conduct.
What was witnessed was Hewitt’s pattern of insubordination. On one occasion, she demanded her name appear on the cover of a report, in violation of Brookings’ policy that research assistants’ contributions be noted in the acknowledgments. When her other supervisor, Robert Einhorn, denied the request, Hewitt bypassed him and appealed directly to Bruce Jones, the Vice President for Foreign Policy.
On another occasion, Hewitt challenged the policy requiring research assistants to use personal leave for external conferences. When Kevin Scott, the chief administrative officer, said no, Hewitt again went over his head to Jones.
Rose counseled Hewitt twice — formal, private sessions in which he told her that her behavior was unacceptable, that she needed to respect the chain of command, and that the rules applied to her.
Hewitt’s response, according to Rose’s sworn declaration, was that she “didn’t need the administrative staff to tell her what to do.”
When Hewitt left Brookings in 2019 for a contractor position at NNSA, Rose took her to a going-away lunch with Twardowski and Higuchi. It was cordial. It was unremarkable.
What happened next is not what happens between a woman and a man she says sexually harassed her.
From July 2019 through May 2021 — more than two years after she left Brookings — Hewitt continued to contact Rose for career advice. She messaged him on LinkedIn. In November 2020, she suggested they “get together for a virtual coffee.” She confided that NNSA was “not the right fit” and that she was exploring a position at the Center for Naval Analysis.
When Hewitt applied for a permanent federal position in the NNSA Office of Public Affairs in 2020, Joel Spangenberg, the acting deputy associate administrator, contacted Rose for a reference. Rose gave her one. She was hired. At her request, Rose also provided a reference for the security clearance required for the position.
In 2021, Rose was nominated as Principal Deputy Administrator of NNSA. The FBI conducted a full background investigation. The agents never mentioned any allegation of sexual harassment from Hewitt or anyone else.
Hewitt kept all of the messages, the career advice, the references on LinkedIn. After the Politico story ran, she deleted her LinkedIn account. When a LinkedIn account is deleted, both sides of every conversation disappear. Rose had the foresight to preserve the private messages and included them in his filings.
The Trigger
Rose and Hewitt overlapped at NNSA from August 2021 through December 2023. During that time, Rose had no direct contact with her. But in the fall of 2023, a staffing problem brought them into conflict.
The NNSA Office of Public Affairs, which reported directly to Rose, was understaffed. Of the ten authorized positions, only five were filled. Part of the problem was employees on detail to other offices, including Hewitt, who was on a rotational assignment at the Department of Defense.
When Rose hired Anna Newby as the permanent director in May 2023, they discussed the staffing crisis. Newby told him her office would be fine as long as she got Hewitt back.
Extensions of rotational assignments are at management’s discretion based on NNSA’s needs. Rose told the director that Hewitt would either need to return to NNSA at the end of her detail or find a permanent position at the Department of Defense.
Rose did not think it was fair that NNSA would have to continue paying her salary while operating the Office of Public Affairs short-handed.
True to form, Hewitt went around Rose. She asked Vipin Narang, the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy, to contact Rose and lobby for a reconsideration. Rose ultimately approved a six-month extension as a favor to Narang, but at the end of it, she would have to find a permanent position at DoD.
The Accusations
Hewitt’s allegations were not about anything Rose did at NNSA. No one accused him of misconduct during the nearly three years he served as the agency’s number two official. The allegations were about his time at the Brookings Institution, five to six years earlier, from 2018 to 2019, when Hewitt was his research assistant.
They did not surface organically. They surfaced in late 2023, after Rose initially declined to extend Hewitt’s detail to the Department of Defense because his own Office of Public Affairs was critically short-staffed. Hewitt’s response was to claim that Rose had denied the extension as retaliation — because, she now alleged, she had filed a sexual harassment complaint against him at Brookings years earlier.
There was no record of any such complaint. Brookings never confirmed one. The FBI, which conducted a full background investigation of Rose in 2021, never found one. Rose says he never heard of one.
To explain Hewitt’s attitude about the importance of lying if need be to get what one needs we need only quote her.
Speaking on a panel about women in national security, Hewitt stated:
“This system, the National Security and the intelligence system, was not built by women, with women in mind. So the rules that we have to operate by were not made for us. And so I don’t feel like we should be held to them, to be totally frank with you. Women should not be held to the rules… you don’t have to play by the rules.” — Kate Hewitt (@blondenukegirl)
The underlying allegations, the supposed harassment at Brookings, were not allegations of assault. No groping. No physical aggression. No suggestion that Rose ever conditioned Hewitt’s employment on sexual favors.
Hewitt’s specific claims, as reconstructed from Rose’s point-by-point denials in his sworn declaration, were that Rose had leered at her, that he had told her he had “inappropriate thoughts about her all the time,” and that he stared at her legs or chest.
Rose denied all of it under oath: “I never touched Hewitt in any way. I never leered at Hewitt. I never told Hewitt that I had ‘inappropriate thoughts about her all the time.'” He stated that every interaction he had with Hewitt was professional and aimed at helping her succeed.
Frownfelter
Rose’s defamation complaint alleges that Hewitt did not act alone. She had an ally: Faiza Frownfelter, a former NNSA contractor in the Office of Communications who had worked at NNSA through a contract with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Rose had little if any personal contact with Frownfelter — she was a contractor, not a colleague, not a direct report, not someone he worked with day to day. But in January 2024, when Frownfelter’s contract ended, she refused to turn over the files and intellectual property she had created under it. The work had been paid for with taxpayer money. It belonged to NNSA. Frownfelter apparently believed it belonged to her.
Rose did what any responsible government official would do. He blocked her from obtaining future NNSA contracts until the terms of the previous one were honored. That was not harassment. It was contract enforcement — a senior official ensuring that the government got what it paid for. But Frownfelter saw a man who had cut off her livelihood, and she wanted payback.
The Politico article quoted an unnamed source whom Rose’s complaint identifies as Frownfelter, saying she “warned female colleagues ‘to be cautious’ about potential harassment when working with Rose’s office.”
This was not a woman who had been harassed. This was a contractor who had been held to the terms of her contract by a man she resented, and who retaliated by joining forces with another woman who had been disciplined by the same man. Between them, they manufactured a narrative, and DOE, under a culture that treated every accusation from a woman as gospel, never questioned it.
The 3:00 a.m. Phone Call
In February 2024, while traveling in Hanoi on official business, Rose received a 3:00 a.m. phone call from his boss, NNSA Administrator who informed him that she had received complaints regarding his workplace behavior. She provided no details — only vague statements about a “hostile work environment” and “harassment.”
Hruby told Rose that the DOE’s Office of Hearings and Appeals (OHA) would conduct a “fact-finding” investigation. She said it would be fair. She said Rose would be interviewed.
Rose told Hruby he would cooperate. Later that day, Hruby sent an official email, copying OHA Deputy Director Matthew Rotman, asking Rose to acknowledge the investigation and confirm he would not retaliate against anyone. Rose responded within hours.
The Wrong Office
It was strange. Hruby told Rose the investigation would be handled by DOE’s Office of Hearings and Appeals. She said it as though it were routine. It was not.
DOE has four offices with the authority to investigate allegations of harassment and misconduct.
The Anti-Harassment Program handles harassment complaints under DOE Policy Memorandum No. 102, with established notice and response procedures. The Office of Civil Rights adjudicates discrimination-based harassment claims under federal EEO regulations, with a complete process and appeal rights. The Office of Inspector General investigates employee misconduct, abuse of authority, and retaliation. And NNSA’s own Office of Internal Affairs conducts internal integrity and personnel-conduct investigations within the NNSA enterprise.
Each of these offices has formal procedures, creates a record, has appeal mechanisms, and would have required DOE to inform Rose of the charges against him and to give him a chance to respond.
Instead, DOE assigned the investigation to the Office of Hearings and Appeals, an office whose jurisdiction is generally limited to FOIA appeals, security clearance hearings, whistleblower adjudications, and regulatory exceptions. OHA does not investigate harassment complaints. It has no established procedures for doing so. It has no notice requirements, no rights of response, and no appeal mechanisms for the accused.
As Rose’s lawyers argued in their filings: “By bypassing the offices expressly empowered to manage harassment and misconduct complaints — the AHP, OCR-EEO, and OIG — and instead assigning OHA to conduct an unsanctioned ‘fact-finding,’ DOE acted outside its own governing framework and deprived Mr. Rose of the notice, response rights, and procedural safeguards those directives guarantee.”
Seventeen Days
Two days after he got the call in Hanoi, Rose returned to Washington and reiterated his willingness to cooperate. On March 4, he communicated his availability for an interview. On March 5, Rotman replied: “We will certainly reach out if we need anything.” Rose acknowledged Rotman’s message and reiterated his availability for an interview for the fourth time.
Seventeen days after the 3:00 a.m. phone call, Rose had not been interviewed. He had not been told what the charges were.
March 12: The Day the Trap Closed
On March 12, 2024, Hruby called Rose again. The investigation, she said, was complete. Rose would not be interviewed. She did not provide any findings. She did not tell him the specific allegations. She reiterated only the hostile work environment and harassment of three women.
Then she delivered the message. Christopher Davis, the Department of Energy’s Chief of Staff, wanted him out by the end of April. No hearing. No interview. No charges. Just out.
Rose was an at-will political appointee. He understood what he was being told: the investigation had been concluded without him. There was no hearing to request, no appeal to file, no alternative to accept.
He retired.
On March 28, Hruby sent an agency-wide email announcing Rose’s retirement, effective April 2024.
On April 10, Deputy General Counsel Jocelyn Richards told a different story. In an email, she stated that the OHA fact-finding “has not been completed, as Mr. Rose is expected to leave the Department in late April 2024.”
On May 29, Richards said the inquiry had been “rendered moot by Mr. Rose’s retirement.”
Someone was lying. Hruby told Rose on March 12 that the investigation was complete. Richards said on April 10 that it was not. Richards said on May 29 that it had been rendered moot by the retirement that the investigation itself had forced.
Rose resigned on April 30, 2024.
The Politico Story
Five days after Rose left NNSA, Politico ran a story. It cited eight anonymous sources. No identified victims. No named accusers. The story relied on one anonymous woman: Kathryn “Kate” Hewitt.
This is what derailed a thirty-year career. Not an allegation of misconduct at NNSA. Not something that happened on the job he was being removed from. An allegation about events five years earlier at a think tank — allegations that only materialized when the accuser didn’t get what she wanted, that were denied under oath, contradicted by every colleague who worked alongside them, unsupported by the FBI, and made by a woman who spent two years after the alleged harassment seeking the man’s career advice, his job reference, his security clearance reference, and his company over virtual coffee.
In Granholm’s DOE, it was enough.
Rose’s real offense was not misconduct. His real offense was being a man — a Black man, no less — who refused to genuflect to the ideological orthodoxy that Granholm had installed at the top of the nuclear enterprise.
He pushed back on diversity plans. He told his staff that NNSA’s job was building nuclear weapons, not advancing social causes.
In Granholm’s DOE, he became a heretic. And when a disgruntled woman pointed a finger at him, the institution that Granholm built did what it was designed to do: it believed the woman, dispensed with the man, and never stopped to ask whether the accusation was true.
Since April 2024, Rose has applied for more than twenty jobs in his field. He has received rejections or silence.
Rose sued DOE and NNSA in federal court for denying him due process. He sued Hewitt in Virginia for defamation.
On January 21, 2026, a federal judge heard the government’s motion to dismiss the case.
He said no. The case goes forward.
Part Two: “A Federal Judge Said Frank Rose Deserves a Hearing”
Frank Parlato is an investigative journalist, media strategist, publisher, and legal consultant.
Please leave a comment: Your opinion is important to us!
Consider what this says about institutional reliability. If national security agencies can’t run a basic, procedurally sound investigation, why should the public trust them with far more consequential decisions?
Promoting the LGBTQ+ agenda while eliminating credible, competent men. Great system: no interview, no findings, just “please clean out your desk,”— the intentional weakening of the US.
Thirty years of service erased by a process that never even heard him.
Welcome to modern Washington: whisper, leak, retire the problem. Then call investigation “moot”.
Let the court process play out. Motions to dismiss being denied doesn’t prove the allegations were false or that DOE acted unlawfully—it just means the claims are legally plausible. If discovery confirms the investigation bypassed required procedures, that’s where accountability should land.