Files declassified by President Donald Trump on former Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) and the Chinese spy known as Fang Fang reveal that the disgraced ex-congressman admitted to the FBI he had a sexual relationship with her — and that the bureau attempted at one point to recruit her without her knowledge. The documents prove that the United States government was aware of the suspicious relationship between Swalwell and Fang since at least 2014, years before Axios broke the story in 2020. A zip file of documents, labeled “Rusty Thumbs” after the FBI’s codename for Fang, was published on the White House Election Integrity webpage on Monday along with the following synopsis:
The FBI developed evidence that a Chinese woman with direct ties to that country’s intelligence service had potentially compromised a Democratic congressman from California with sex, foreign interns and illicit donations while she was being recruited to become a bureau informant a decade ago, according to bombshell memos that expose another threat to America’s political system from Beijing. The files chronicling the relationship between Rep. Eric Swalwell and the Chinese national Fang Fang – also known by her English name Christine Fang – were declassified by President Donald Trump and released Monday by the White House Government Transparency Task Force as part of a broader effort to unmask foreign threats to U.S. political and election systems.
