Eric Swalwell spent years telling America that Donald Trump was a Russian asset. Newly released federal files say Swalwell himself sat down with FBI agents and admitted he had slept with a suspected Chinese intelligence operative — and then kept his seat on the House Intelligence Committee anyway. The documents were made public Monday by the White House Transparency Task Force and first detailed by the New York Post.
The California Democrat’s relationship with Christine Fang — the woman known publicly as “Fang Fang” — went considerably deeper than what the public was told when the story first surfaced in 2020. According to the investigative files, the relationship included “physical relations” on multiple occasions, along with a scheme to drum up campaign donations for the then-freshman congressman.
Swalwell was interviewed at the FBI’s Oakland outpost in 2015 and admitted to sex with the suspected spy after the two met in 2012, the Post reported. Interview notes say he grabbed a drink with Fang and that the two had “casual” relations on several occasions, often communicating by text message. In one instance described in the files, Fang turned up at Swalwell’s apartment and the two “hooked up” after he had taken an Ambien — an encounter he later claimed he barely remembered.
Let that sit for a second. A sitting member of Congress told federal agents he could not fully recall a night with a woman the FBI suspected of working for the Chinese Communist Party.
The two investigative documents were created roughly between 2013 and 2015, while Swalwell was serving his first term in the House of Representatives. Fang also helped organize fundraisers for him in Las Vegas and California, according to a witness interview contained in the files. Fang was a suspected operative for the Chinese Communist Party and, by all accounts, cultivated relationships with a network of politicians and other influential figures across California and beyond — she was not a random acquaintance who wandered into a fundraiser.
Swalwell has said previously that he cut off contact with Fang and cooperated with investigators in the matter. That has been the entire defense for six years: he helped, so the story is over. What the newly public files show is how much was left out of that tidy summary — the bedroom, the Ambien, the fundraising, the years of text messages, all of it sitting in FBI paperwork while Swalwell was seated on the very committee that reviews America’s most sensitive intelligence and lectures the country about foreign influence.
Imagine, for one honest moment, that a Republican congressman had confessed to federal agents that he repeatedly slept with a suspected Beijing operative who was also raising money for his campaign. There would be no ambiguity about whether that man kept his clearance, his committee seat, or his career. The coverage would not stop for a month.
This is a window into what happens when a party decides that accountability is something it applies to opponents and negotiates with in-house. The Chinese Communist Party did not need to hack a server to get close to the United States Congress. It sent someone to a fundraiser, and one of the loudest voices on the Intelligence Committee let her in the door.
Source: nypost.com