This may be overstated a bit but it's definitely interesting. You probably recall that long before Eric Swalwell vanished from public life to escape a maze of allegations from various women, he was tied to another embarrassing scandal.
Early in his career, Swalwell had some unspecified relationship with Christine Fang (aka Fang Fang). Fang raised money for Swalwell and may have had a more personal relationship with him until the FBI tipped Swalwell off to the fact that she was a Chinese spy.
Swalwell says he cut off contact with her and shortly thereafter she fled the country. Swalwell was investigated by the House Ethics Committee but in 2023 the committee concluded he hadn't done anything illegal. However, there were always questions about the exact nature of his relationship. Simply put, people wondered whether a guy on the House Intelligence Committee for eight years had fallen into a Chinese honeypot. Despite being cleared by House Ethics, Swalwell was pulled off the intel committee in 2023.
But as Swalwell was running for governor of California earlier this year, Kash Patel suggested maybe it was time to release the FBI's files on Swalwell and Fang Fang. Swalwell responded by threatening to sue.
Eric Swalwell has issued a cease-and-desist letter to FBI Director Kash Patel over threats to release investigative files about a suspected Chinese spy who infiltrated his office.
In the letter, Swalwell, who is considered the Democratic frontrunner in the race for California governor, demanded the FBI agree within three days not to release the files, and that doing so could result in legal action, according to the Washington Post.
Swalwell held a press conference Monday, insisting the “case is closed” and accused Patel as a “temporary employee” engaged in a “horrendous abuse of power” in digging up the investigative files about him and and Christine Fang — a suspected Chinese Communist Party asset who cultivated ties with the East Bay rep starting when he was a Dublin city council member.
But here's where it gets really interesting. A story published yesterday (by an outlet I'm not familiar with) claims that Swalwell argued releasing the files could be seen at political retribution because of a past relationship he had years earlier.
According to information provided to Sources Say News, Swalwell’s side raised the prospect that releasing the files could be viewed as a punitive attempt to weaponize the Department, pointing to the congressman’s long-concluded sexual relationship with former senior administration official Katie Miller from roughly a decade ago.
Miller — now the wife of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller — had been involved with Swalwell when she was in her early 20s, before her relationship with her now-husband. Miller said that she was unaware that the past relationship had been discussed with the DOJ.
I had no idea that relationship ever existed but Katie Miller seems to have confirmed it in a tweet responding to the story above.
I was an intern working on Capitol Hill. https://t.co/cafxSo4CzX
— Katie Miller (@KatieMiller) August 7, 2026
So is this why the information on Swalwell and Fang Fang was never released? Maybe. But also, the norm in Washington is not to dump investigations that didn't lead to charges.
Attorneys at the Justice Department, then led by Attorney General Pam Bondi, communicated with a lawyer for Swalwell about the investigation, including efforts to prevent the files from being released, according to a source familiar with the exchanges.
The dispute also comes against the backdrop of longstanding Justice Department policies and regulations that generally prohibit officials from releasing investigative information for the purpose of embarrassing individuals or unfairly prejudicing their rights, particularly when no criminal charges have been filed.
Bondi ultimately decided not to release the files and she was fired by Trump about a month after this all happened. Some reports published at the time claimed that Trump fired her for leaking word of plans to release those documents to Swalwell, with whom she was apparently friendly. But the White House denied that was the case.
The whole thing is strange and smells like politics on all sides. Do I think Swalwell had something to hide? Yeah, probably. Do I think there was cause to release that? Probably not under the rules everyone in Washington seems to have adopted. Whether those rules serve the public is another question.
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