On the menu today: Everyone enjoyed knocking around the disgraced former Representative Eric Swalwell, but the scandal may have one last consequence, in the presidential ambitions of Swalwell’s close friend, Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego. Read on.
Gallego’s Presidential Hopes Dwindle
Up until quite recently, Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego looked like an intriguing dark horse candidate for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination. He is exceptionally young by the standards of the most recent Democratic president (46 years old), Latino, represents a key swing state, and is a Marine who served in 3rd Battalion, 25th Marines, who served in al Anbar region of Iraq.
The son of immigrants from Colombia and Mexico, Gallego tried to explain to his fellow Democrats, “Every Latino man wants a big-ass truck, nothing wrong with that.” A progressive in the House, he pivoted hard to the center once he was running for Senate, declaring, “I think border walls are part of an overall comprehensive security.” He even got in a brief kerfuffle over jokes that Democrats oppose “allowing women to be hot,” and texting a friend, “Dem women look like dem men and dem men look like women.”
Yet the disgraced former California Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell may end the “Gallego 2028” buzz before it even really gets rolling.
Gallego and Swalwell were close friends. Gallego served as national campaign chairman for Swalwell’s 2020 presidential bid. In addition, their children attended baseball camp together, the families had regular dinners, and they babysat each other’s kids. Back in March 2021, the two traveled to Qatar with their families on a trip paid for by the U.S.-Qatar Business Council.
The embarrassing resignation of a potential presidential candidate’s close friend would be bad enough; even worse, on April 7, after the first reports of Swalwell having sex with his interns emerged, Gallego defended his friend from the accusations, posting on X, “When you are in first place, is when they target you. Eric is a fighter and he will win the Governors race. [sic]”
Once the accusers started coming out of the woodwork, and Swalwell withdrew from the governor’s race and resigned from the U.S. House, Gallego had to do damage control. Last Tuesday, the senator appeared at a cringe-inducing press conference. Among Gallego’s comments:
Eric Swalwell lied to all of us. He lied to the most powerful people in this country and they trusted him. They trusted him with some of the most sensitive spots in our government, whether it was on the Judiciary Committee, the Intel Committee, impeaching Donald Trump.
And that clouded my judgment, my friendship with him. Our family’s friendship together with him clouded my judgment. And I was wrong. I deeply, deeply regret that. The women that came forward are courageous and they still deserve justice. But to be clear again, I also had no knowledge of predatory behavior, sexual assault, or harassment.
But later in the press conference, Gallego’s position that he had “no knowledge” was adjusted to merely hearing rumors:
When there were rumors going around a couple weeks ago, not of the folks in the whatever, San Francisco Chronicle, I did ask him and he lied to me. He knew that I just came off a very, very hard campaign for two years where they lied about me and my family for two years. He manipulated me to have the same sentiment that I was having back in the day and used as an opportunity to move me to defend him.
The reporters at the press conference sounded unconvinced.
Q: How did you not know about the allegations? Considering you chaired his presidential campaign, wouldn’t some of this have come up? Some of those allegations predated when he ran for office?
Gallego: Again, this man led a double life. He lied to us. He lied to his family, lied to his constituents. Some of the most powerful people in this country. You know, even before he ran, he was trusted with some, you know, positions that normally we would never think someone like this could do if they’re leading that double life. And again, I was manipulated. I was lied to. And everyone else was too.
And later:
Q: Congressman, you have future political ambitions. How can people trust you to run for higher office if you didn’t know that your best friend was engaging in even inappropriate behavior?
Gallego: Look, I messed up. I’m human. I trusted this man. I trusted him to watch my children.
Later:
Q: What about any sort of position that he may have put himself in? Any compromising position? Was he drinking excessively? Was he around younger women? Did you see any of that?
Gallego: I didn’t see that. But look, we all heard rumors in Washington, D.C., about Eric Swalwell for many years. And my family, again, was with him all the time — with his wife, with his kids. And we saw a different side of Eric that — I, I’d never saw. And when I asked him about some of these rumors that were starting on the internet, a few weeks back, he also denied it and said the same thing like, “The same thing they tried to do to you in 2024 is what they’re trying to [do to me].”
Later:
Q: Well, what were the rumors? What were the rumors that you heard? What were the rumors?
Gallego: It was flirty. That was flirty.
Q: And that was — when about what year was it?
Gallego: I mean, that was . . . we’ve heard that throughout.
So Gallego had heard the rumors, “for many years.” He just took Swalwell’s denial at face value.
Apparently, lots of people on Capitol Hill knew Swalwell was one of the sleaziest guys in politics. And apparently the only person in Congress who had no idea that any of this stuff was going on is the senator who was one of his closest friends.
Proximity to a sex scandal may be worse for Gallego, because while lots of politicians have messy divorces, a married politician divorcing his wife when she’s nine months pregnant, and then proposing to a lobbyist, is, shall we say, suboptimal.*
Back in 2024, our old friend Eliana Johnson, reporting at the Washington Free Beacon, laid out the details of Gallego’s awkwardly timed divorce:
On Dec. 15, 2016, Rep. Ruben Gallego (D., Ariz.) filed for divorce from his wife, Kate Gallego, then a Phoenix city councilwoman. He filed a motion to seal the case file on the same day.
It was Ruben Gallego who moved to seal the record back in 2016. In his memorandum making the case to the court, he noted that Kate Gallego had “not yet been served” with divorce papers, nor had “her attorney entered an appearance” in the case, but that she was “likely to give birth any day.”
Gallego’s petition for divorce stipulated that the “parties’ marriage is irretrievably broken” and that “there is no reasonable prospect of reconciliation.” But Kate Gallego appears to have been blindsided by her husband’s decision. When she responded to her husband’s filing in February of 2017, she said she was “without knowledge of information sufficient to form a belief” about her husband’s claim that the marriage was broken beyond repair — and she denied the allegation.
The newly unsealed file also shows that Gallego wanted his wife to foot the bill for the divorce proceedings, stipulating that he was “entitled to an award of attorney’s fees” pursuant to an Arizona statute allowing a court to award attorney’s fees based on several factors.
Divorcing a wife “likely to give birth any day” is a complication. Marrying a lobbyist is another; Gallego proposed to his current wife, National Association of Realtors lobbyist Sydney Barron Gallego, about two years after his divorce with Kate. “In his book, They Called Us Lucky, Gallego writes of proposing to Sydney in February 2019, just eight months after their first meeting: ‘In February 2019, I asked her to marry me,’ he writes.”
Nonetheless, Gallego offered a clear message in the aftermath of the Swalwell scandal. It’s that he never would have thought that Swalwell could or would ever do something like this. He never noticed or saw anything that suggested this was going on, other than the rumors that he had heard “for years.” He was manipulated and he was lied to; he proved to be naïve, gullible, and easily fooled.
And apparently, that’s why he should be the next president of the United States.
Keep in mind, Gallego vehemently denies that he is the other man in the video of Swalwell on a hotel bed with two women and another man, and the accusation that he used $2,000 in campaign funds to pay for a stay at the Fairmont El San Juan in Puerto Rico in June 2021, around the time of his wedding there. Gallego’s staff reportedly has documentation that the funds were used on “a down payment on a reservation for a campaign event that was held later that year.”
Running for president is hard. The scrutiny you get as a presidential candidate is ten times as intense, and more critical, than the worst day almost any state political press corps can dish out, no offense intended to the reporters out in Arizona. (Swalwell and Gallego avoided any serious fallout from the Qatar trip by simply refusing to ever comment or answer questions about it.)
The messy divorce; the Qatar-funded trip; forgetting to list more than $53,000 in campaign spending in a Federal Election Commission filing; and now insisting that Eric Swalwell, who famously gave off “creep vibes,” fooled him as deviously as Keyser Söze . . . eh, suddenly Gallego doesn’t look like the focus-grouped, polished-resume, demographically ideal candidate of Democrats’ 2028 dreams. If Gallego runs, and if he starts to get traction in a crowded Democratic field, his past will provide a target-rich environment for the negative ad maestros of deeper-pocketed rivals like Illinois Governor JB Pritzker or California Governor Gavin Newsom.
Some might argue that in the post-Trump era, scandals don’t matter anymore, although the rapid defenestration of Swalwell and sudden end to Tim Walz’s ambitions for a third term suggest otherwise. There are a lot of people hoping that 2028 manifests the long-brewing backlash to Trump’s reflexive nastiness and sordidness, and that decency, civility, and integrity make some long-overdue comebacks. Democrats will no doubt want to feel good about their nominee in 2028, and it’s probably hard to sell “Eric Swalwell’s naïve best buddy” as the right answer to a high-stakes question.
ADDENDA: There are times when I wish the NR crew were closer together, but having our team spread across the country (and sometimes, the world!) means that we’ve got someone like Jeff Blehar for a front-row seat of how Brandon Johnson is turning “the city that works” into “the city that doesn’t work, because the mayor is obsessed with reparations for slavery.”
I did get to see some of my far-flung colleagues in Miami last week, as part of the National Review Institute’s regional seminar series. There’s another one on economic freedom coming up in Dallas on May 28 (where I won’t be), and I hear that one on national security and American leadership is planned for June 29 in Newport Beach, Calif. (Watch this space for details and registration).
*An earlier version of this newsletter wrote that Gallego’s proposal and divorce occurred in the same year. The divorce was in 2017, the proposal was in 2019. I regret the error.