There is a particular species of politician who survives Washington not by virtue of accomplishment, but by sheer audacity — the kind of man who, having never really done anything, has never really been held accountable for anything. Eric Swalwell has been that man for thirteen years. On Friday, that career of perpetual unaccountability appears to have met its reckoning.
The San Francisco Chronicle broke the story that a former staffer — a 21-year-old woman when she began working in Swalwell’s district office in 2019 — alleges that the congressman sexually assaulted her twice when she was too intoxicated to consent. The first alleged assault occurred in 2019, when she says she was invited out for drinks by her boss, became so inebriated she cannot remember what happened, and woke the next morning naked in Swalwell’s hotel bed.
A second alleged assault occurred in 2024 at a charity gala in New York, years after she had left his employment. The Chronicle reported that its journalists reviewed corroborating text messages she sent to a friend in the days following the 2024 encounter, reviewed her medical records showing visits for STD and pregnancy tests, and interviewed her then-boyfriend, who confirmed she had told him about the assault and urged her to go to the police.
Later the same day, CNN reported that three additional women had come forward with separate sexual misconduct allegations against Swalwell, including accounts of unsolicited nude photos.
By Friday evening, Swalwell’s campaign for California governor was dissolving in real time.
The Collapse
The speed and totality of the political abandonment was remarkable — not, it must be said, because Democrats suddenly discovered moral backbone, but because the math became impossible. Within hours of the Chronicle’s publication, his campaign chairman, Rep. Jimmy Gomez of Los Angeles, resigned his role and called on Swalwell to exit the race. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Minority Whip Katherine Clark, and Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar issued a joint statement calling on Swalwell to “immediately” end his campaign.
Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi — a longtime Swalwell ally who represents the very district where many of these events allegedly unfolded — called for an investigation and made clear his campaign could not continue. Senator Adam Schiff withdrew his endorsement. Senator Alex Padilla called on Swalwell to step aside. Senator Ruben Gallego, a self-described close friend, withdrew his endorsement and said what he had witnessed was “indefensible.”
The California Teachers Association, which had been among Swalwell’s most prominent union backers, suspended its endorsement. The California Federation of Labor announced it was “acting urgently” to determine next steps. Senior campaign staffers — including a top labor consultant — had already resigned before the story even published, a detail that speaks volumes about what those inside the campaign knew and when they knew it.
Swalwell, for his part, issued the statement one would expect: the allegations are false, they are politically motivated, they come conveniently on the eve of an election. His attorney dispatched a cease-and-desist letter to the accuser, warning of defamation suits if she did not retract her claims. “For nearly 20 years, I have served the public — as a prosecutor and a congressman and have always protected women,” he said.
This is the Swalwell brand in concentrated form: the invocation of service as a shield against scrutiny, the suggestion that the office of congressman is itself a character reference, and the immediate pivot to claiming victimhood at the hands of political enemies.
A Career Built on Performance
It is worth pausing to consider what Eric Swalwell’s congressional career actually consisted of, because the man running for governor of California on the strength of thirteen years in Washington largely distinguished himself through television appearances rather than legislative accomplishment. He was the congressman who went on cable news to accuse Donald Trump of being a Russian agent — “He’s working on behalf of the Russians, yes,” he told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews — while simultaneously having cultivated a relationship with Christine Fang, a suspected operative of China’s Ministry of State Security.
The Fang Fang story, which broke in December 2020, revealed that the suspected Chinese intelligence asset had helped fundraise for Swalwell’s 2014 congressional campaign, helped place an intern inside his Washington office, and maintained a close relationship with him from approximately 2012 through 2015. Swalwell sat on the House Intelligence Committee — the committee with oversight of the CIA — throughout the period when Fang was active in his orbit.
The House Ethics Committee ultimately closed its investigation without making a finding of wrongdoing, and Swalwell was not charged with any crime. But the episode illuminated something essential about the man: here was the loudest voice in Congress accusing his opponents of foreign collusion, a man who had himself been targeted and cultivated by a foreign intelligence operation and who seemed to regard his own cooperation with the FBI as sufficient to end all conversation on the matter.
The irony was noted even by commentators at the center-left American Enterprise Institute, which observed that Swalwell had built his public identity around accusing Trump of the very thing he had himself been entangled in. He pushed on, undaunted, never developing the self-awareness to recognize that credibility, once bargained away in pursuit of partisan celebrity, does not return simply because the accuser changes the subject.
Add to the Fang Fang affair the subsequent reporting about Swalwell’s use of campaign funds — more than $200,000 in taxpayer and donor money spent on childcare costs, including over $100,000 to a single individual — and the portrait that emerges is of a man who treated the machinery of political power as a personal benefit program while styling himself as a champion of the working California family.
The “Believe Women” Question
No honest account of this story can avoid the political context. Democrats spent much of the last decade constructing and enforcing an ideological framework around sexual misconduct allegations — one premised on the principle that women’s accounts must be believed, that power imbalances between a boss and subordinate make consent inherently fraught, that institutional skepticism of accusers is itself a form of harm. These were the arguments deployed against Brett Kavanaugh, against Clarence Thomas, against virtually any conservative figure who faced such allegations, no matter how remote in time or thin in corroboration.
The former Swalwell staffer’s account is not thin in corroboration. She has text messages. She has medical records. She has witnesses. The Chronicle’s report reflects the kind of sourcing and documentation that, when leveled against a Republican nominee for the Supreme Court, would have generated weeks of saturation coverage and formal demands from Democratic senators for withdrawal. Her own ex-boyfriend encouraged her to go to the police. She demurred, she told the Chronicle, because of his power.
“I never thought anyone would believe me,” she said, “because of how powerful he was.”
This is precisely the dynamic that #MeToo was ostensibly designed to address: the powerful man who operates without fear of accountability because he has cultivated the networks, the endorsements, and the institutional protections that make accusation itself feel futile. One might have expected that a movement built on such premises would be most vigilant about the powerful men within its own coalition — the ones who use progressive rhetoric as camouflage.
Instead, what we observe is the familiar pattern: Democratic allies calling for Swalwell to step aside, yes — but doing so only after the Chronicle’s story made denial untenable, only after the polling math made him a liability, and only after the weeks of social media rumors that preceded the publication had given the party apparatus time to calculate its exposure. Tom Steyer “commended the brave former staffer for speaking out.” Katie Porter called the allegations “horrifying.” Gavin Newsom said through a spokesperson that they were “deeply troubling.” These are the statements of politicians doing damage control, not the expressions of a party that takes seriously the principles it claims to hold.
Where were these voices during the weeks when rumors were circulating on social media and Swalwell’s campaign was issuing preemptive denials? Where were Schiff and Pelosi and Jeffries when the whisper network — which in every such case runs well ahead of formal reporting — was doing its work? The California Democratic Party, which was perfectly positioned to conduct a quiet inquiry when the rumors first surfaced, instead waited for a newspaper to do its work.
What California Deserves
The Swalwell campaign had been built on a proposition that, in retrospect, was always dubious: that a man with a Chinese intelligence entanglement on his record, a history of wild public accusations he could not substantiate, and a facility for self-promotion that vastly exceeded his legislative accomplishments, was the man to lead the most populous state in the union. He had polled well in a crowded field not because California Democrats found him especially impressive, but because his national television profile gave him name recognition that more substantive figures lacked.
Republican Steve Hilton, the former Fox News host, put the political stakes plainly. “It’s incredible to me that Eric Swalwell thought he could run for Governor of California while all this was going on,” Hilton said. “It shows the complete contempt these career politicians have for the public.”
This is, for once, an observation that requires no partisan translation. A man who knew what he had done — or, in the most charitable construction, knew the extent of his exposure — declared himself the frontrunner for governor of California and attacked anyone who raised questions as a MAGA operative.
The Proverbs observe that “pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall” (Proverbs 16:18). The verse is ancient, but its observation of human nature is precise. Eric Swalwell conducted himself for years as though the rules that apply to ordinary men — about power, about accountability, about the weight that accrues to the office one holds when dealing with someone who depends on that office for their livelihood — simply did not apply to him. He was a congressman. He served the public. He always protected women. The incantation of service was supposed to settle the matter.
It didn’t settle it for the young woman who woke up in his hotel room. It didn’t settle it for the three additional women CNN spoke with. And it should not settle it now, for the voters and institutions that are only now, belatedly, performing the scrutiny they owed the public from the beginning.
The California governor’s race will go on. Whether Swalwell has the audacity to remain in it — and given his track record, audacity is not a quality he lacks — is secondary. The more important question is what this episode reveals about how California’s Democratic establishment evaluates the men it elevates: not by character, not by conduct, but by television presence, institutional loyalty, and the willingness to perform the correct opinions on demand.
That is not a governing philosophy. It is a protection racket. And on Friday, one of its more prominent beneficiaries was finally made to answer for it.
