Newly declassified FBI files blow open the Eric Swalwell–Fang Fang story

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Newly declassified FBI records say agents investigated whether Christine “Fang Fang” Fang secretly funneled foreign money into Eric Swalwell’s campaigns through straw donors.
Swalwell acknowledged to agents that he had a sexual relationship with Fang and that she referred interns to his offices.
Crucially, the FBI ultimately found no federal criminal violations by Swalwell and dropped him as a subject in 2017.

For years, the public version of the Eric Swalwell-Fang Fang story went something like this: A suspected Chinese intelligence operative cultivated the California Democrat, helped with fundraising and placed an intern in his congressional office, but when the FBI warned Swalwell about her, he cooperated and cut her off.

The newly declassified FBI files released Monday reveal there was considerably more going on behind the scenes.

According to the documents reviewed by Just the News and investigative journalist Sam Cooper, the FBI opened a formal public-corruption investigation in 2014 examining whether Christine Fang — better known as Fang Fang — was funneling prohibited foreign campaign contributions through American intermediaries while helping secure internships in Swalwell’s political operation.

At one point, investigators were looking at both Swalwell and Fang.

The FBI memo described the objective as obtaining enough evidence to pursue Swalwell and Fang over potential campaign-finance violations and alleged quid-pro-quo exchanges involving contributions and internships.

That’s a rather different picture from what Americans heard when this story exploded publicly in 2020.

The FBI documents say investigators believed Fang “used conduits to conceal herself as a prohibited Foreign National source” for campaign contributions on at least four occasions — twice in 2013 and twice in 2014.

Agents concluded that the 2013 conduit contributions could be traced back to Fang herself, according to the newly released records. The FBI also documented an instance in which Fang allegedly solicited a contribution from a person who happened to be an FBI confidential source and offered reimbursement.

Then there’s the question everybody has been asking for years. What exactly was Swalwell’s personal relationship with Fang?

According to FBI interview summaries released Monday, Swalwell acknowledged having “physical relations with Fang” on multiple occasions. In a subsequent interview, he described an occasion when Fang arrived at his home and the two “hooked up.”

So much for that mystery.

The documents also show Swalwell acknowledged Fang referred interns to his congressional and campaign offices. He told investigators that his operation regarded those referrals as coming through her connections to the Asian Pacific Islander American Public Affairs Association.

And there’s another remarkable twist.

Before investigators uncovered the suspected campaign-finance activity, the FBI itself had been attempting to recruit Fang as a confidential source.

Agents gave her the code name “Rusty Thumbs,” created a fictitious company and planned to use her connections as a window into Chinese influence operations targeting American political figures. Fang even signed a contractor agreement with the undercover operation in June 2013.

Why was the FBI interested in her?

Because according to the declassified records, the bureau already suspected Fang had connections to China’s Ministry of State Security. One FBI memo reportedly identified her parents as “known MSS intelligence officers.”

The undercover recruitment effort appears to have helped expose the alleged campaign-finance activity, and six days after that effort ended, the FBI opened its initial investigation.

Fang eventually left the United States for China in 2015 after agents began questioning people around her and searched her home. A closing FBI memo said investigators had developed evidence of possible violations by Fang involving foreign-national contributions, contributions in another person’s name, false statements and acting as an unregistered foreign agent, among other potential offenses. She was never prosecuted.

The FBI ultimately determined it had not established federal criminal violations by Swalwell.

After interviewing him multiple times, investigators removed Swalwell as a subject in February 2017 and narrowed the investigation to Fang’s alleged campaign-finance violations. The records also confirm Swalwell cooperated with investigators.

That’s particularly significant because earlier reporting painted a substantially more benign picture. When Axios first broke the Fang story in 2020, it reported that she had participated in fundraising for Swalwell but said there was no evidence of illegal contributions. The newly declassified FBI documents now show agents themselves believed Fang had been the source of prohibited contributions routed through intermediaries.

Swalwell fought the release. Earlier this year, his attorneys sent FBI Director Kash Patel a cease-and-desist letter arguing that releasing the investigative file would be an unlawful political smear designed to damage Swalwell’s California gubernatorial campaign.

“The Congressman has never been accused of wrongdoing in that matter,” attorneys Norm Eisen and Sean Hecker wrote, warning the FBI that publication could expose the bureau and its officials to “significant legal liability.”

The documents are out now. And whatever one thinks of Swalwell’s ultimate legal culpability, Americans finally have a much clearer picture of what the FBI was actually investigating.

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