Remember all the way back in 2020 when we covered California Democrat Congressman Eric Swalwell banging a Chinese spy? Well, National Review brings us the breaking news that he admitted it to the FBI all the way back in 2015.
That’s not what I want to talk about today.
Instead I want to talk how the FBI knew that Swalwell was taking money from communist China.
The FBI developed evidence that a Chinese woman with direct ties to that country’s intelligence service had potentially compromised a Democratic congressman from California with sex, foreign interns and illicit donations while she was being recruited to become a bureau informant a decade ago, according to bombshell memos that expose another threat to America’s political system from Beijing.
The files chronicling the relationship between Rep. Eric Swalwell and the Chinese national Fang Fang – also known by her English name Christine Fang – were declassified by President Donald Trump and released Monday by the White House Government Transparency Task Force as part of a broader effort to unmask foreign threats to U.S. political and election systems.
They show the FBI opened a predicated investigation, which is a formal law enforcement inquiry backed by a factual basis or allegation that indicates a crime or national security threat already exists.
Unlike unpredicated “assessments,” a predicated investigation allows agents to use advanced and intrusive methods like electronic surveillance or informants.
The files provide significant new details about the long-rumored relationship between Fang and Swalwell, including that:
The FBI initially wanted to investigate the congressman for a bribery scheme in which he exchanged donations from Fang for her planting interns in his office, but eventually decided to narrow the case to seek criminal charges only against Fang for making illegal donations to the California Democrat through conduits. Swalwell admitted to having sex with Fang, his staff placing Fang’s interns in Congress and not having a strong enough campaign finance system to detect the straw donations she allegedly passed through U.S.-citizen conduits. The Justice Department declined to prosecute Fang despite strong evidence of the illicit donations after she fled the U.S. as the FBI began interviewing her associates and raided her home. The early steps in the investigation were overseen in part by controversial prosecutor Jack Smith, who would later pursue Donald Trump on criminal charges. The FBI was recruiting Fang to be a confidential informant through an undercover agent, assigned her the code name Rusty Thumbs, planned to hire her through a cutout company and was still evaluating her suitability as a confidential human source when they discovered her alleged criminal behavior. The FBI knew early on during the recruitment that Fang was tied to China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), Beijing’s notorious intelligence service. The bureau also identified her parents as MSS agents, knew she was raising money for California Democrats and was willing to use sex as a means of getting ahead in the world of U.S. politics. Fang Fang’s efforts to influence U.S. politicians were first reported by Axios in 2020. According to the outlet’s comprehensive investigation, U.S. officials believed Fang sought to ingratiate herself with local politicians in the San Francisco Bay Area using campaign fundraising, networking, her charisma, and romantic or sexual relationships. Swalwell was identified as among the most significant targets of Fang.
Swalwell threatened to sue the FBISwalwell’s office told Axios at the time that he fully cooperated with the FBI and has reiterated that claim for years. “Rep. Swalwell, long ago, provided information about this person — whom he met more than eight years ago, and whom he hasn’t seen in nearly six years — to the FBI. To protect information that might be classified, he will not participate in your story,” Swalwell’s office said in a statement.
I’m not sure I’ve seen “his own ass” misspelled as “information that might be classified” before.
Swalwell’s interviews with FBI agents, made public as part of the tranche of documents related to the case made public by the White House, confirm the former congressman’s claims that he cooperated with the bureau’s investigation.
Earlier this year, Swalwell threatened to sue the FBI and asked the bureau not to release the files associated with the investigation. Swalwell’s lawyers made his case in a cease and desist letter sent to FBI Director Kash Patel in March.
Snip.
The FBI probe targeting Swalwell and Fang was opened on March 17, 2014, and codenamed “Freshman Fifteen,” according to a now-declassified “Interim Authority” memorandum, which was reviewed by FBI headquarters and the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section.
The FBI assessment, which later became a full-fledged investigation, centered on allegations that Swalwell awarded internships at his offices in exchange for campaign contributions. The FBI identified Fang “Christine” Fang, a Chinese national, as the alleged facilitator of this exchange and alleged she employed conduits to route illegal donations.
“Investigation has revealed Fang ‘Christine’ Fang, a Chinese foreign national residing in the United States, is the facilitator of a scheme to trade access to Swalwell and internships in his congressional office in return for campaign contributions […]” the memo reads. The FBI specifically gathered evidence that Fang “used conduits to conceal herself as a prohibited Foreign National source,” for illegal campaign contributions “at least twice in 2013 and at least two more times in 2014.”
The agents found that the 2013 conduits “trace to Fang herself,” making them an “illegal source of campaign contributions.”
The objectives of the probe were ultimately to “obtain sufficient evidence to indict and arrest Swalwell and Fang for violations of campaign finance laws and quid pro quo exchanges,” the memo adds.
The FBI also caught Fang directly soliciting donations and promising to reimburse the contributor from her own funds, the memos state.
In March 2015, Fang contacted an individual who was also an FBI Confidential Human Source (CHS). She asked the CHS to attend a fundraising event for Swalwell and solicited a contribution.
The FBI agents on the case authored a memo on March 9, 2015 requesting approval for the CHS to “make a bona fide campaign contribution” in order to further the probe. That request was apparently approved. In a “CHS reporting document” dated March 24, 2015, an FBI agent reported that “CHS provided Christine Fang with his credit card number for the $1,000 donation.”
In 2014, Fang invited an individual with whom she had a financial relationship to a fundraiser for Swalwell, according to an FBI-302 from June 2015 memorializing an interview with the individual, whose name is redacted. The individual claimed Fang told him he “just needed to bring his checkbook and that FANG would reimburse him for his donation.” The individual told investigators that he declined.
Snip.
In the early stages of the probe, the FBI team sent regular updates to the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section (PIN), which was then headed by the now-controversial prosecutor Jack Smith. Smith would later lead the Biden administration’s investigations and prosecutions of Trump. PIN oversees investigations and prosecutions that involve federal crimes like bribery of public officials and election crimes, including campaign finance crimes.
All the pieces start to click into place now, don’t they?
Eventually, however, after interviewing Swalwell on multiple occasions, the FBI determined that the investigation had found no violations of federal statutes by the congressman. As a result, the FBI eventually reclassified the probe on February 8, 2017, dropping Swalwell as a subject and focusing the investigation solely on Fang’s alleged violations of campaign finance laws.
Of course they did.
The FBI had hard evidence that the campaign of a Democrat congressman was receiving money from communist China via the Chinese spy he was playing hide the salami with, and instead of pursuing it, they chose to close the case and chase the bogus Russiagate allegations.
And did we mention that Swalwell was on the Committee on Homeland Security, and the ranking member on the Subcommittee on Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection? Don’t you think China would love to receive confidential information on America’s cybersecurity vulnerabilities?
Instead of, at the very least, being forced to resign for banging a Chinese spy and taking campaign money from China, Swalwell was allowed to continue receiving classified information in congress because he had a (D) after his name.
People should be fired.
Tags: bribes, campaign finance fraud, China, China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), Crime, cyberwarfare, Democrats, Department of Justice, Eric Swalwell, Fang Fang, FBI, Jack Smith, John Solomon, Just the News, spying, Steven Richards
fired? People need to be prosecuted as traitors
Seem to be an structural error in organisational DNA, that no whistle-blowers showed up. This need to be fixed.
By the wayside: Solzhenitsyn called the state apparatus for repression ‘the state organs’, as did most of his compatriots. “The Intelligence Community”… is to cozy. It is ‘Organs’.
“People should be fired.”
Chinese appears to have deeply penetrated the US intelligence apparatus, much las Eric Swalwell has done to “Christine” Fang.
Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?’
‘To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.’
‘The dog did nothing in the night-time.’
‘That was the curious incident,’ remarked Sherlock Holmes.
Wouldn’t you expect the FBI to “set up a holler” over Chinese infiltration of Congress??!
I fully expect that the Chinese would spy out US security vulnerabilities but never imagined the FBI would be willing to facilitate it.
“Remember all the way back in 2020 when we covered California Democrat Congressman Eric Swalwell banging a Chinese spy? Well, National Review brings us the breaking news that he admitted it to the FBI all the way back in 2015.”
FBI Director Christopher Wray may know a little something about his Organ(ization)’s involvement with Chinese honeypot operatives. Perhaps Congress could take a peek under the covers and expose the menage a trois involving Swallwell, Fang and Wray.
The FBI’s corruption did not start with Christopher Wray; it predates him by many years.
Disgraced FBI agent John Connolly hooked up with Irish mob boss Whitey Bulger, one of Boston’s most notorious gangsters, in an attempt to bolster his “crime fighting” career. Encouraged by Connolly’s bad example (and perhaps his elaborate hair-style, as well) Wray set out to collaborate with the Democrat Party’s criminal element in furtherance of his own career goals.
Imagine for a moment, if you will, the most vile, degenerate, and sadistic psychopaths that you could ever conceive of. The most corrupt and base criminals. Murderers, rapists, and pederasts with the least amount of impulse control and lacking in the slightest bit of compunction. Remorseless, ruthless, and utterly dedicated to the most primal of self-interested urges. A group so psychologically unaware of their pathologies that their therapists need therapists to stop the nightmares. This is the group that you – as a foreign intelligence agent – must deal with and coerce when trying to influence the United States Congress.
Since it’s a comment to a post about Swalwell & Fang, the phrase “hooked up” implies a specific type of partnership that I’d rather not dwell upon further.
Well I should have made a fuss
Yeah, I shoulda raised a holler
But I sold my country for a handful of dollars
I only wish I could repent
But there’s nothin’ I can do
I gladly forfeited my soul so I could play for Team Blue
–Chrissy Wray and The Comintern, “Blue Team Blues”
“Since it’s a comment to a post about Swalwell & Fang, the phrase “hooked up” implies a specific type of partnership that I’d rather not dwell upon further.”
The phrase was deliberately chosen as a means of highlighting the fornicatory element.
Dangit, you made me dwell upon it further!
“Disgraced FBI agent John Connolly hooked up with Irish mob boss Whitey Bulger, one of Boston’s most notorious gangsters, in an attempt to bolster his “crime fighting” career.”
Don’t forget H. Paul Rico, John Connolly’s former boss and also a Whitey Bulger ‘handler’.
[…] I’m hoping the investigation also sheds light on Swalwell receiving money from communist China. […]