The White House Government Transparency Task Force released declassified FBI documents revealing that agents discovered former Rep. Eric Swalwell's sexual relationship with suspected Chinese spy Christine Fang only after they tried, and failed, to turn her into a double agent.
A 2013 FBI memo, part of the tranche made public Monday, shows an undercover agent met with Fang, whom the bureau assigned the code name "Rusty Thumbs," for reasons that remain unclear, and explored bringing her into a cutout company apparently run by the FBI. The goal was to flip a woman the bureau believed had ties to Beijing's Ministry of State Security, China's primary intelligence agency. Instead, agents concluded she could not be trusted and closed the recruitment file in March 2014, the New York Post reported.
Six days later, the FBI opened a probe into Swalwell himself over Fang's access to the California Democrat, a sitting member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, one of the most sensitive posts in Congress.
The 2013 memo paints a picture of a congressman who treated a suspected foreign intelligence operative as a punchline. Fang told the undercover FBI agent that Swalwell had commented she was suspected of being associated with the "Chinese CIA," but did so "in a joking manner." Fang played along, the memo states:
"[Fang] further joked that all [Ministry of State Security] MSS officers were either old men or ladies, therefore, she could not be MSS."
Fang went further, telling the agent that the MSS "would have hired prostitutes instead of using an MSS officer directly to entice the officials." She also volunteered a telling self-assessment, recorded in the memo:
"RT [Rusty Thumbs] advised that she would be able to 'use her sexuality on politicians' if she wished to because she was 'young and pretty'."
That boast was not idle talk. On April 30, 2015, the FBI gave Swalwell a classified briefing about Fang's suspected intelligence ties. At that point, the documents show, Swalwell was still seeing Fang every two months. During the process surrounding that briefing, Swalwell confessed to "physical relations with Fang on a handful of occasions."
The FBI's own assessment of Fang noted that her "motivations appear to be centered on money and power" and that she exhibited "certain egotistical/narcissistic traits which may impact her suitability as a source." The bureau also found that both of Fang's parents were Chinese intelligence officers, a detail that made her recruitment as a reliable American asset untenable and her proximity to a member of the Intelligence Committee all the more alarming.
The declassified files go beyond a personal affair. Just The News reported that the FBI formally opened a predicated investigation codenamed "Freshman Fifteen" on March 17, 2014, targeting both Swalwell and Fang for campaign finance violations. A declassified FBI interim authority memorandum stated that the investigation revealed Fang was "the facilitator of a scheme to trade access to Swalwell and internships in his congressional office in return for campaign contributions."
Swalwell admitted to having sex with Fang and acknowledged that his staff had placed Fang's interns in his congressional office. The FBI had evidence that illegal campaign donations were routed through conduits, a bribery scheme that, if proven, would have implicated both a sitting congressman and a foreign national operating on American soil.
The case raises a question that congressional leaders never adequately answered: how a member of the Intelligence Committee maintained a sexual relationship with a suspected Chinese agent for an extended period without anyone in his party raising an alarm. When the story first broke publicly, a pattern that has repeated itself with other Democratic figures caught in compromising relationships, the institutional response was muted.
Before the documents went public, Swalwell's attorneys fired off a cease and desist letter to FBI Director Kash Patel. The letter did not dispute the substance of the files. Instead, it attacked the motive behind the release:
"The Congressman has never been accused of wrongdoing in that matter and your attempt to release the file is a transparent attempt to smear him and undermine his campaign for Governor of California."
The attorneys added: "Your actions threaten to expose you, others at the FBI, and the FBI itself to significant legal liability." At the time of the letter, Swalwell was described as the frontrunner in the Democratic primary for California governor, a campaign that has since been overtaken by events.
Swalwell himself pushed back publicly when reports of the planned release first surfaced in March. "Donald Trump is targeting me. He's trying to influence the election. There is only one reason why: he's scared," Swalwell told reporters at the time. FBI Director Patel had directed agents to gather and redact sensitive documents for release to senior administration officials, and bureau leaders reportedly discussed sending agents to China to interview Fang, believing she could have additional damaging information on the congressman.
Swalwell's claim that he was never accused of wrongdoing sits uneasily beside the declassified record. The FBI opened a predicated investigation into him. He confessed to a sexual relationship with a woman the bureau assessed as tied to Chinese intelligence. His campaign accepted donations the FBI traced to an illegal conduit scheme. The fact that no charges were filed does not erase the investigation, it raises its own questions about why the matter was allowed to fade.
The Swalwell-Fang relationship first became public on December 8, 2020, when Axios published a report revealing his ties to the suspected Chinese operative. Republican leadership briefly removed Swalwell from the House Intelligence Committee. Democrats later returned him to it, a decision that looks worse with every new document that surfaces.
That decision to restore Swalwell's committee seat meant a congressman who had confessed to sleeping with a suspected foreign agent continued to receive some of the most sensitive intelligence briefings the U.S. government produces. The classified material he accessed during that period remains a counterintelligence concern that the declassified files do not resolve.
Swalwell resigned from the House in April amid separate sexual misconduct and rape accusations, which he denied. His departure ended a congressional career that had been shadowed by the Fang affair for years, but it did not end the questions. The broader pattern of concealed misconduct in Congress, and the institutional reluctance to confront it, remains a live issue.
The 2013 memo captures a revealing moment of candor from Fang. She told the undercover agent that she "had an opportunity to marry rich in Beijing, but chose not to because she wanted to find her own path." The FBI noted that she gave inconsistent accounts of her parents' retirement plans and made "ambiguous" statements about her past, red flags that contributed to the bureau's decision to abandon the recruitment effort.
Fang later alleged, through Chinese media, that both the FBI and CIA had attempted to recruit her. The declassified files confirm at least the FBI's side of that claim. Whether Fang was a trained intelligence officer, a freelance operator motivated by money and status, or something in between, the FBI's own records show she was close enough to Chinese intelligence to alarm career counterintelligence agents, and close enough to a U.S. congressman to compromise him.
The federal scrutiny of elected officials' financial entanglements has intensified in recent years, but the Swalwell case stands apart. This was not a paperwork violation or a late disclosure. The FBI believed a foreign intelligence service had placed an operative inside a congressman's personal life, and that the congressman knew enough to joke about it before the bureau ever briefed him.
Fang's FBI file also contained a classified intelligence report that reportedly included "intricate and intimate" details about her relationship with Swalwell, including alleged sexual acts. The full scope of the documents released by the White House Government Transparency Task Force, and whether additional material remains classified, has not been disclosed.
The timeline the declassified files lay out is damning in its own right. In 2013, Swalwell was already joking that Fang might be connected to Chinese intelligence. The FBI tried and failed to recruit her. Six days after giving up on Fang, agents opened a probe into the congressman. By April 2015, the FBI sat Swalwell down for a classified briefing, and he admitted he was still seeing her every two months and had slept with her multiple times.
Yet Swalwell kept his seat on the Intelligence Committee. Democrats restored him to it after Republicans removed him. He continued to access classified material. He ran for governor of California as a frontrunner. And when the FBI moved to make the files public, his first instinct was not to address the substance but to follow the playbook other embattled Democrats have used: blame the disclosure on political targeting and threaten litigation.
The declassified record does not show a congressman who was duped by a sophisticated intelligence operation and came clean at the first opportunity. It shows a congressman who laughed off the risk, maintained the relationship, confessed only when confronted, and fought to keep the public from learning the details.
Transparency is not a smear. When a member of the Intelligence Committee sleeps with a suspected foreign spy and the public only finds out years later through declassified files, the failure belongs to every institution that chose silence over accountability.
