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Donald Trump’s White House Declassified the Eric Swalwell File to Affect His Election
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The most important date you need to know about the Eric Swalwell files (Swalwell investigative file, Fang informant file) that John Solomon oversold, again, the other day, are not the ones that show that Eric Swalwell was probably fucking a Chinese spy in the same time frame that he reportedly had a “fling” with then Congressional Intern Katie Waldman around 2014, nor that the investigation into whether Swalwell knowingly accepted foreign donations from Christine Fang lasted into the time he served on the Intelligence Committee.The most important date is the date the White House declassified the files: March 23, several months in advance of the California gubernatorial primary on June 2, and several weeks before Swalwell dropped out of the race on April 12 in the face of allegations of sexual misconduct.
The story the files tell is only damning to the extent it reveals Swalwell would fuck a young woman who showed up at his door uninvited, as he described doing with Fang, without thinking twice about it.
But we learned far worse than that from the reporting leading up to his resignation.
The files describe that FBI started testing whether Fang would make a worthwhile informant about the Chinese intelligence ties her family had in March 2013. But in June 2013, the FBI discovered she had solicited donations on behalf of Swalwell, and the FBI switched focus from Chinese spies to a Democratic Congressman (Fang seems to have had closer ties to then-Fremont Mayor Bill Harrison than Swalwell). The following spring, the FBI closed Fang as an informant and then laid out a plan, using an informant, to test whether Swalwell would accept donations from China. They formally opened the investigation targeting Swalwell in June 2014. In 2015, they tried to get Swalwell to accept a donation via Fang. On April 30, 2015, the FBI did a defensive briefing for Swalwell, and Swalwell offered up numerous details about Fang (and asked whether she may have surveilled his campaign). Days later (presumably having discovered he was neither hiding nor protecting her), on May 5, 2015, the FBI did a formal interview, where Swalwell admitted he had had sex with Fang. The FBI continued to interview others — the intern Fang placed in Swalwell’s office, the winery owner who had provided Fang assistance, and the Burger King owner who had also supported Fang — who had ties to Fang’s introduction to Swalwell.
The latter interview is interesting for the observation that he “did recall FANG being upset in the past when SWALWELL had a girlfriend.” After all, the period when Fang was cultivating Swalwell squarely overlaps with the period when Stephen Miller’s future wife reportedly had a fling with Swalwell.
In October 2015, FBI gave up its plan to try to get Swalwell to accept Chinese donations; it turns out Fang had figured out the FBI informant was an FBI informant.
In March 2016, the FBI interviewed Swalwell again to obtain testimony to present to a grand jury. He told them about the time Fang showed up at his door and they had sex, in more detail (but he claims he couldn’t remember details because he had taken an Ambien). He also told them about the shit show fundraising event at the Wynn Casino in Las Vegas, where Fang hadn’t delivered the donations she promised but had tried to get him into her grand suite, that had originally raised concerns.
In February 2017, the FBI closed down the part of the investigation targeting Swalwell. While Fang had tried to donate to him, he had returned the donations she attempted to give him. She had committed a crime, FBI had concluded; he had not, a clearer exoneration than the one Robert Mueller came to about Trump’s knowing acceptance of help from Russians in 2016.
In May 2017, the FBI shut down the investigation. Not because Jack Smith was going easy on a Democrat, as frothy right wingers are claiming, but because Fang had fled the country and in any case, the Special Agent in Charge in San Francisco, “determined that prosecution is non-viable due to national security reasons.”
When you publicly release details of the FBI’s counterintelligence operations, as Trump now has, you help foreign spies.
In fact, some of this was aired in real time. On March 28, before Swalwell dropped out of the gubernatorial race, WaPo reported that Kash was planning on releasing the files.
FBI Director Kash Patel is pressing to release a decade-old investigative file involving Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-California) and a suspected Chinese intelligence operative, recently dispatching agents in the bureau’s San Francisco office to quickly redact the files before they are released publicly despite no evidence of wrongdoing by Swalwell, according to three people familiar with the effort.
Two days later, still before Swalwell dropped out of the gubernatorial race, WaPo reported that Norm Eisen and Sean Hecker sent a cease and desist letter to stave off the release.
Swalwell’s attorneys, Sean Hecker and Norman L. Eisen, wrote in Monday’s letter that releasing the Swalwell documents would violate several laws, including the federal Privacy Act of 1974. It would also violate the First Amendment, they added, since it would amount to targeting Swalwell for his outspoken views about President Donald Trump.
The cease-and-desist letter also warned against running afoul of the long-standing Justice Department norm that law enforcement agents should refrain from taking any public investigatory steps against a political candidate in the 60 days before an election, to prevent even the appearance of the department using its power to sway the vote.
“For these reasons, we demand that you cease and desist from all efforts to publicly disclose any investigative files concerning Congressman Swalwell, including any effort to dispatch agents to gather, redact, and prepare such files for release,” the letter said.
And now we find out that some unnamed person at the White House did declassify those files, all ready to go to affect an election.
The day after Swalwell stepped down, Katie Miller complained that the timing of all this was suspect, complained about a “coordinated takedown” the likes of which the White House already had planned for Swalwell.
Back in March, when the release of these files were only a potential future hit job, WaPo revealed that Kash was considering sending Agents to China to seek dirt on Swalwell.
As FBI director, Patel has focused on trying to bring a criminal case against the outspoken Democrat, reassigning multiple agents in San Francisco to work on the matter, the current and former officials said. FBI leaders have even discussed sending agents to China to talk to the suspected intelligence operative, believing she could have damaging information about Swalwell, according to two of the people familiar with the investigation.
[snip]
The lengths that Patel’s circle is going to in the bid to pursue a political foe of the president have raised alarms within the bureau, where some officials fear that releasing the files — even with redactions — could compromise law enforcement sources and investigatory methods, making it harder for the FBI to gain trust with potential witnesses.
They also said they feared the repercussions of sending agents to the territory of an adversarial nation to dig up information on a sitting congressman. Such an interview, legal experts said, would be impossible without Chinese interference, and Fang would be considered an unreliable witness.
Since then, Kash’s favorite mouthpiece for propaganda, Jana Winter, revealed that Kash — who had at least used to own $5 million in Shein stock — had traveled to China himself in late July.
Patel returned from a trip to Beijing in late July, and a similar trip to Russia has been tentatively planned for October, according to FBI officials.
In exclusive interviews with Reuters, Patel described the FBI’s initiatives with what he called “non-traditional partners” as selective and limited to specific types of transnational crimes such as global child pornography networks and cyber scam centers that prey on Americans.
[snip]
During his trip to Asia last month, Patel met with Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong and Vice Minister Xu Datong to deepen what Chinese state media described as “practical cooperation” on a range of criminal activities.
Winter’s credulous piece also served to prep Kash’s trip to Russia in October.
Kash Patel didn’t just redact the Fang files in March. The White House declassified them, in the middle of an election campaign.
Which is a far more damning detail than anything in the actual files.
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