In May 2015, sitting inside an FBI field office, Rep. Eric Swalwell told federal investigators he'd had "physical relations" with a woman who worked for him named Christine Fang — known to the intelligence community as Fang Fang — "on a handful of occasions." He also told them he'd found approximately five email exchanges with her in his personal Gmail account.
Newly released FBI documents reveal fresh details about the scope and timeline of Swalwell's entanglement with Fang. The two met in 2012, the same year Swalwell was elected to Congress. By 2014, Fang was fundraising for his reelection campaign and had placed an intern inside his congressional office. Their last physical contact, according to Swalwell's own statements to the FBI, occurred in March 2015.
Fang wasn't a casual acquaintance who happened to be foreign-born. She was a honeypot trap sent by Chinese officials to infiltrate the U.S. government. Between 2011 and 2015, she cultivated relationships with political figures across the country. She communicated with Swalwell through text messages, phone calls, and emails. She embedded herself in his campaign infrastructure. She put a person inside his office. And then, in 2015, after the FBI was closing in on her, she left the United States before the FBI could bring charges.
FBI Director Kash Patel's release of the files brings the timeline into sharper focus than Swalwell has ever voluntarily offered. When Axios first exposed the Fang Fang connection in 2020, Swalwell declined to provide specifics, saying only that he had "provided information about her to the FBI." That was technically true. What he didn't mention was how much information he'd provided about himself in the process — including the admission of a sexual relationship with someone the Bureau was investigating as a foreign agent.
The House Ethics Committee eventually closed its investigation into Swalwell without action. No criminal charges were filed. And in March 2026, Swalwell's attorneys sent a cease-and-desist letter — presumably to anyone still asking uncomfortable questions.
That's the part that should land hardest. A member of Congress admitted to federal investigators that he had a sexual relationship with a Chinese spy who had infiltrated his campaign and placed staff in his office. The FBI documented it. And the institutional response was to close the file, keep him on the Intelligence Committee, where he had access to top secret information, and let him spend the next several years lecturing the rest of us about national security threats.
Swalwell joined the House Intelligence Committee in 2015 — the same year he the FBI came to him about who Fang really was, and the same year she fled the country. The committee that oversees America's most classified intelligence programs gave a seat to a man the FBI had just interviewed about his compromised relationship with a foreign operative.
The cease-and-desist letter from March tells you everything about where Swalwell's head was. He took no accountability for his actions --sleeping with women who worked for him or falling for a classic spy plot. He offered no transparency to his constituents or the American people about what China had done, or how he had been compromised. And even worse he suppressed the truth from getting out for several years so he could remain on the powerful committee. Swalwell's instinct wasn't to address what happened, it was to threaten anyone who brings it up with legal action.
That's not a scandal that refuses to die. That's a file that was never supposed to be opened.