Saturday night at San Francisco International Airport, FBI agents walked up to former Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell, handed him a search warrant, and took his cellphone and electronic devices. The next morning, they showed up at his Washington, D.C., residence with a second warrant and seized more electronics.
The 45-year-old former congressman is now the subject of a federal criminal investigation into sexual misconduct.
Let's back up, because the layers here are remarkable. At least five women have accused Swalwell of sexual misconduct or rape. A former staffer alleges the married congressman raped her twice — once in 2019 and again in 2024 — when she was too intoxicated to consent. Another accuser, Lonna Drewes, has publicly alleged Swalwell drugged, choked, and raped her. Two other women, Ally Sammarco and Annika Albrecht, say Swalwell sent sexually inappropriate messages on Snapchat, with Sammarco alleging he sent her an unsolicited photo of himself.
Swalwell resigned from Congress in April after 13 years, dropping his California gubernatorial bid at the same time. A House Ethics Committee bipartisan investigation into the allegations ended the moment he walked out the door.
Convenient timing on that resignation.
The Department of Justice opened its federal investigation in April — the same month Swalwell quit. FBI agents had spent the intervening months building their case to the point where a federal judge signed off on not one but two search warrants targeting one of the loudest voices in Congress screaming "Collusion!" while simultaneously sleeping with a Chinese spy.
The media would love for us to forget that Swalwell carried on a sexual relationship with Christine Fang — better known as "Fang Fang" — a Chinese intelligence operative sent to infiltrate our government and report back to China. He admitted it to the FBI during interviews in May 2015 and March 2016. Despite that, he sat on the House Intelligence Committee for years, with access to classified information, and Democrats defended him the entire time.
On Monday — with impeccable timing — the White House released 97 pages of declassified FBI documents related to the Fang Fang investigation, as reported by CBS News. So we now have a former congressman who slept with a Chinese spy, who sat on the Intelligence Committee anyway, who resigned under a cloud of sexual assault allegations from five different women, and whose devices are now in FBI custody.
Swalwell's public response has been a masterclass in having it both ways. He told reporters, "I will fight the serious false allegations made against me. However, I must take responsibility and ownership for the mistakes I did make." Which raises the obvious question: what "mistakes" are we talking about, exactly, if the allegations are all "false"? You can't claim total innocence and partial responsibility in the same breath. Well, you can — but only if nobody's paying attention.
Some Democrats are already positioning this as a politically motivated investigation. That's an interesting argument to make about a case that started with allegations from women — the same people we were told to "believe" unconditionally approximately five minutes ago. It's also hard to call it political when Manhattan's District Attorney's Office and the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department have reportedly been conducting their own separate investigations.
Swalwell once sat on the committee responsible for overseeing American intelligence. Now the intelligence community is overseeing him.