SWALWELL CHINA SPY INVESTIGATION CLEARS HIM
The bureau dropped him from the case caption nine years ago and closed the file against the woman it accused instead. The White House declassified it in March, three weeks before he resigned, and put it online five months after he was gone.
The White House published 147 pages of FBI files on Eric Swalwell on Monday afternoon, in a zip file on whitehouse.gov, under a task force it calls Government Transparency. Every page carries the same stamp: declassified by White House memorandum, dated March 23. The redactions were made four days ago.
The file clears him. Not in a lawyer's reading — in the bureau's own words.
On February 8, 2017 an FBI agent wrote the document that changed the case's name. "Investigation to date has not found violations of federal corruption statutes perpetrated by Congressman Eric Swalwell. Investigation has revealed violations of campaign finance statutes perpetrated by Fang Fang, also known as Christine Fang." The bureau took Swalwell out of the caption and left Fang in it alone. The closing memo three months later put it again: agents found no evidence of a quid pro quo between Fang and the congressman or his office, and evidence that Fang had broken the law. Prosecutors never charged her. The San Francisco field office decided prosecution was "non-viable due to national security reasons." She left the country and was barred from coming back.
What the pages do show, and what nobody had published before, is how hard the bureau tried. Agents opened an assessment on Swalwell in March 2014 and a full public-corruption investigation that May, captioned with his title and the words SENSITIVE INVESTIGATIVE MATTER. They ran an undercover operation whose first stated objective was to "obtain sufficient evidence to indict and arrest Swalwell and Fang." Its authorising paperwork names them both as subjects, "both of whom are fully predicated."
