Peter Schweizer: Eric Swalwell’s Sudden Political Death a Strategic Hit Job

Rep. Eric Swalwell’s sudden political death was no accident, but a strategic hit job by an unethical California Democratic Party and its media enablers. “Swalwell was pushed out for strategic purposes,” says investigative journalist Peter Schweizer.

Call it the law of the jungle. In this case, Swalwell was running strongly in the leadup to California’s June 2 “jungle primary” election for governor, which will eliminate all but the top two vote-getters of either political party who then advance to the November election. With so many Democrat candidates splitting support, Republican Steve Hilton was leading in state polls, so someone had to go.

On The Drill Down podcast, Schweizer and co-host Eric Eggers review the body count and identify which ethically challenged members will be next to go.

“Before this scandal really took off, Steve Hilton, a Republican, led in the polling with 22 percent,” Schweizer says. “Eric Swalwell had 18 percent, and Chad Bianco, a Republican sheriff in California, was in third place… Along come these allegations against Swalwell.”

Swalwell’s multiple extramarital affairs — including with a Chinese spy known as “Fang Fang” while he served on the House Intelligence Committee — were known in Democrat and political press circles for years, as San Francisco political journalist and author Steve Tavares, who first covered Swalwell as a local official in the Bay area, recently said.

Suddenly, the whispers became a roar and in just a few days Swalwell suspended his campaign for governor, resigning from Congress a day later.

“Bottom line, this is not ‘cleaning house.’ This was a political assassination designed to preserve the gubernatorial office in California for Democrats,” says Schweizer. “Now the odds to win it favor Tom Steyer, the billionaire who is looking right now as somebody who has a pretty good chance of becoming governor of California.”

But this is Congress, “America’s only native criminal class,” as Mark Twain once said, so the backroom deals were already flying. Texas Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales, also under fire for admitting a past affair with one of his congressional staffers, hastily announced his immediate “retirement” from office on Monday.

The Swalwell story “is the California Democrats’ version of the Joe Biden senility story,” says Eggers. President Biden’s mental decline was discussed quietly for three years in Washington, yet Democrats defended him as “fully engaged” until his debate performance in June of 2024 exposed his frailty. Suddenly, the calls by Democrats for him to drop his re-election bid exploded from thin air. Like Biden, Eric Swalwell was suddenly no longer useful to Democrats, except as a bargaining chip when paired against Gonzales with congressional Republicans to maintain the balance of power in the House.

“What [Gonzales] should have done was not run for reelection,” Schweizer says. Previously, “he did not step down because if he had resigned it would have erased that one vote majority for Republicans in the House. It’s not like Republicans were pushing hard for him to resign.” With Swalwell’s “paired” resignation, the balance is maintained.

There is already another housecleaning swap taking shape involving two Florida representatives.

Democratic Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick is under an ethics committee investigation for a brace of charges that she violated campaign finance laws. She has already been criminally charged by the Justice Department with stealing FEMA grant funds and funneling them to her political campaign.

“She was the CEO of a healthcare services company [during COVID] and then a state agency mistakenly gave her company about $5 million extra dollars’ worth of FEMA relief funds,” reports Eggers.

Across the aisle, Florida Republican Rep. Cory Mills is under ethics committee investigation on charges he violated campaign finance laws, misused congressional resources and engaged in sexual misconduct or dating violence. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said Tuesday he would “review” an ongoing investigation into whether Mills (R-FL) committed an assault and benefited from federal contracts while in office.

There is an incentive for members who are under ethical fire to resign rather than dig in and force a vote by the full House to censure or expel them, as Schweizer notes.

“The rule is, if you are a current sitting member of Congress, those reports will be publicly released. If you resign or retire, however, they will not. This is what former Rep. Matt Gaetz did when he was in Congress. He was the subject of an ethics investigation — allegations of sexual misconduct in some form or another. Right before that report was going to come out, he resigned from Congress, so it will never be publicly released,” Schweizer explained.

So, as far as Eric Swalwell is concerned, Swalwell ends well.

For more from Peter Schweizer, subscribe to The DrillDown podcast.