Swalwell is a remarkably well-known figure considering the brevity of his résumé. There’s a reason for that.
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks. This week, we look at Representative Eric Swalwell’s one-time status as a mainstream media darling, and we cover more media misses.
Another Mainstream Media Icon Falls from Grace
Representative Eric Swalwell is a remarkably well-known figure considering the brevity of his résumé. The California Democrat is, more than anything else, a creation of cable news bookers, who found in him a reliable guest who could be counted on to show up and opine against President Trump, day and night, for years on end. Now, that same cable news ecosystem that produced Swalwell is giving voice to the sexual misconduct allegations that led him to end his gubernatorial campaign over the weekend.
After a brief stint as a deputy district attorney in Alameda County, Swalwell rose from the Dublin City Council to the House of Representatives in 2012 and has by all appearances spent most of the time since in cable news green rooms.
A New York Times report published after Swalwell dropped out of the gubernatorial race captures the shallowness of his political career perfectly:
“Mr. Swalwell, a Democrat, had no experience in state government and few connections with leaders in a State Capitol run by his party. What he had was a media profile as a Trump antagonist, burnished by years of appearances on news shows that made him more familiar to voters than most of his competitors.”
After the San Francisco Chronicle revealed Friday that a former staffer had come forward with allegations that Swalwell sexually assaulted her on two occasions while she was intoxicated, CNN, which Swalwell has appeared on countless times, contributed accounts from three other women who accused the representative of sexual misconduct, including sending them unsolicited explicit messages or nude photos.
The backlash was swift — he lost all 21 of the endorsements he had received from fellow Democratic members of Congress; GOP Representative Anna Paulina Luna is moving to expel him from Congress; and the House Ethics Committee and Manhattan District Attorney’s Office are investigating allegations against him. He was left with no choice but to suspend his campaign for California governor.
“To my family, staff, friends, and supporters, I am deeply sorry for mistakes in judgment I’ve made in my past,” he said, adding that he “will fight the serious, false allegations that have been made — but that’s my fight, not a campaign’s.”
Swalwell’s attorney, Elias Dabaie, said the disgraced representative denies allegations of sexual misconduct but acknowledges he has had “lapses in judgment.”
But according to at least one local political journalist, Swalwell’s alleged misconduct should come as little surprise to many in the worlds of media and politics, as his behavior was apparently an open secret for more than a decade now.
“Shortly after being elected to Congress in 2013, his behavior towards women was known by all levels of our local government and the Alameda County Democratic Party,” East Bay political journalist Steve Tavares wrote in a social media post on Saturday.
“I tried repeatedly to get the stories out. I can’t force women to speak out, and when they chose not to, I didn’t push. I also knew that Swalwell was known to threaten litigation.”
Yet the media touted Swalwell for years as an anti-Trump icon, with cable news shows inviting him back time and time again to unload on the Republican president. Those same broadcast news outlets extended a similar friendliness in turning a blind eye to previous reports about Swalwell’s alleged national-security-threatening indiscretions with a Chinese spy.
Swalwell first entered the California governor’s race last year during an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, with the eponymous host introducing the Democrat as a popular representative who “does battle daily with the forces of MAGA — and the president does not like him at all.”
Among media outlets, it was widely acknowledged that the one thing Swalwell had going for him was his ability to rant on camera about President Trump.
Politico identified Swalwell as “an outspoken Donald Trump antagonist,” while the Los Angeles Times called him “a nettlesome foil and frequent target of President Trump and Republicans.”
“The ability to protect California from Trump’s policies and political vindictiveness,” would be among several priorities that would be “pivotal to Swalwell’s potential path to the governor’s mansion,” the LAT reported last year.
“The congressman is perhaps best known for criticizing Trump on cable news programs. But he’s faced ample attacks as well,” the LAT went on to add, acknowledging the controversy that first arose in 2020 around his association with Chinese spy Christine “Fang Fang” Fang, who raised money for his congressional campaign. The outlet reported that Swalwell “cut off ties with her in 2015 after intelligence officials briefed him and other members of Congress about Chinese efforts to infiltrate the legislative body. He was not accused of impropriety.”
In 2020, Axios reported that Fang had targeted American politicians with the aim of gaining “proximity to political power” with “campaign fundraising, extensive networking, personal charisma, and romantic or sexual relationships with at least two Midwestern mayors.” The public sphere has long suspected Swalwell had a romantic relationship with the spy, though those claims have not been verified.
Cable news shied away from the Fang Fang controversy on numerous occasions, including when CNN invited Swalwell on for a segment in March 2025 to discuss the Trump administration’s Signal scandal, in which officials used the messaging app for sensitive military communications, despite Swalwell’s own national-security missteps. CNN allowed Swalwell to rant about the administration’s “lack of accountability” on the scandal. MSNBC also invited Swalwell on to discuss the news as a national security expert.
One month later, CBS Mornings Plus aired a segment on a then-newly revealed policy change from the Biden administration that carried on into the Trump administration barring federal government workers stationed in China from engaging in romantic relationships with Chinese citizens over concerns about spies trying to elicit sensitive information. And yet, Swalwell’s alleged involvement with Fang Fang was not brought up once in the almost eight-minute-long segment.
The major networks also proved reluctant to highlight Swalwell’s lapse in allowing Fang into his orbit, whether personal or professional.
As House Republicans moved to kick Swalwell and Representative Adam Schiff off the House Intelligence Committee, CNN Newsroom co-host Erica Hill criticized then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy for not following “tradition.” Over on MSNBC, guest Jason Johnson blasted McCarthy for trying to oust Swalwell and Schiff, arguing “there’s no legitimate reason to keep Schiff or Swalwell off the intelligence committee.”
“In fact, if anything it’s to lock out people who are primarily concerned with this country from knowing the dangers that perhaps other colleagues on the committee provide to this country,” he argued.
As he made the cable news rounds attacking Trump, Swalwell received little to no pushback for ratcheting up the rhetorical dial to an absurd degree.
PBS’s Judy Woodruff barely reacted when Swalwell compared Trump to terrorist Osama bin Laden in January 2021.
Swalwell said at the time that Trump had to be impeached because “this president incited, radicalized, and essentially commanded his supporters to storm the Capitol last week,” and “he will do this again.”
When Woodruff noted that Trump’s defenders said he wasn’t part of the mob that stormed the capitol himself, Swalwell replied, “Well, Osama bin Laden did not enter U.S. soil on September 11, but it was widely acknowledged that he was responsible for inspiring the attack on our country, and the president, with his words, using the word fight, with the speakers that he assembled that day who who called for “trial by combat” [Rudy Giuliani] and said he have to take names and kick ass [Rep. Mo Brooks]. That is hate speech that inspired and radicalized people to storm the Capitol.”
Woodruff only replied, “Are you comparing President Trump to Osama bin Laden?”
Swalwell said, “I’m comparing the words of a individual who would incite and radicalize somebody as Osama bin Laden did to what President Trump did. You don’t actually have to commit the violence yourself but if you call others to violence that itself is a crime.”
And in October 2022, Swalwell’s campaign aired an outlandish, fearmongering ad that featured two police officers showing up at the home of a family of four and telling a woman who had undergone an abortion that she would have to submit to a physical examination, before they draw their guns and arrest her.
Comedian Trevor Noah approvingly called it “one of the most hard-core campaign ads you’ve ever seen.”
“And yes, this ad is exaggerating things to make a point but it’s true that in many states in America, cops could drop to your door if you had an abortion,” Noah said. “They could arrest you and they could force you to have a physical examination. I mean, ironically, it’s probably the only free health care you’ll ever get in America.”
And as far back as 2016, Swalwell received favorable coverage from none other than Taylor Lorenz in The Hill, with Lorenz dubbing the representative the “Snapchat king of Congress,” a moniker that now seems apt, though maybe not in the way Lorenz intended, considering the Swalwell’s alleged penchant for sending women unsolicited nude photos.
Headline Fail of the Week
The New York Times recently published a book review with an unusual title, to put it mildly: “To Topple the Patriarchy, These Women Have Sex With Vegetables.”
“The Polish best seller ‘Hexes of the Deadwood Forest’ is like a post-porn fever dream of Eastern European magic realism crossed with a plant-based ‘Joy of Sex,’” a subheading reads.
The review starts with a lengthy content warning: “Hexes of the Deadwood Forest, the best-selling Polish author Agnieszka Szpila’s first book to be translated into English, includes the following: adult themes, adult content, adult language, violence, suicide, sexual assault, torture, murder, genocide, bestiality, cruelty to children, sex with moss, sex with grass, sex with mushrooms, sex with lichens, sex with feathers, sex with rotten vegetables and sex with frozen dirt.”
“In her acknowledgments, Szpila credits the activists Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens for introducing her to a radical movement ‘in which Mother Earth becomes the Earth Lover, and feminism opens to water and the liquefaction of all that is stiff, ossified and lifeless,’” the review adds. “(She also thanks a witch friend who advised her on the erotic potential of the calamus rhizome.) But Szpila’s two earlier novels, while less concerned with the particulars of nature fetishism, have long since established the writer as an ecofeminist voice in Poland, whose powerful Catholic right wing has in recent years clashed loudly with women’s groups over questions of abortion access and gender equality.”
Media Misses
- Former NBC Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd is apparently just as worried about President Trump having access to nuclear weapons as he is about the Iranian regime having such access.“You got to ask the question, we’re worried about a radical in Iran getting their hands on a nuclear weapon. What about what’s going on in our country? . . . I can see him [Donald Trump] talking himself into the ultimate weapon here in his head. I do. I could see him being that crazy,” Todd told Chris Cillizza on the So What podcast.
- MS NOW host Ali Velshi recently hosted Professor Timothy Snyder on his show to discuss Trump’s Truth Social post that warned a “whole civilization will die” if Iran did not agree to a cease-fire. Snyder claimed Trump’s post could leave American service members vulnerable to a Nuremburgesque trial on charges of genocide.“It was after the Second World War at Nuremberg it was specifically decided that just following orders wasn’t a defense. In other words, there are norms, there are laws. There are other things out there besides the vertical chain of command. And this is something else to note. It’s not just that soldiers and officers are right to reject illegal orders.”Snyder added, “It’s also the case that if they don’t, they are now under the shadow of genocide. Because Mr. Trump has made clear that an intention, a determinable intention, of this conflict was to destroy a civilization, which means that if you destroy a bridge, if you destroy a dam, if you destroy a school, it’s not just a war crime in itself. It could be construed as being part of a much larger war crime, or, as you say, the crime of crimes, genocide itself.”