By Jeffrey Blehar
Tuesday, April 14, 2026
Freshman Representative Eric Swalwell arrived in
Washington, D.C., in 2013, having just knocked off an incumbent Democrat
(ancient snapping turtle Pete Stark) in the first election cycle after
California adopted its “top two” primary system. By 2019, the Northern
California representative was known to national political observers as a highly
visible (and gaseously self-righteous) opponent of Donald Trump’s
presidency, a headline-seeking fixture of the cable news “rubber chicken”
circuit of endless moral preening during five-minute TV hits. By 2024, Swalwell
stood among the vanguard of the Democratic “resistance,” as one of its most
aggressively public, square-jawed, elected faces.
And in November 2025 he announced his candidacy for
California governor, eventually picking up the endorsements of many of the
state’s biggest powerbrokers, including Senator Adam Schiff. With the all-party
primary set for June, and the hopelessly split Democratic field all clawing
haplessly at one another in the polling like crabs in a bucket, Swalwell was
beginning to look like the one who would separate himself from the rest of the
pack, the one Democrat who would make it to the general election ballot in
November — and thus inevitably to Sacramento in January.
Until Friday morning, that is. Now? It’s all over.
Swalwell suddenly suspended his race for governor on Sunday night. And unless
you were vacationing somewhere without Wi-Fi until this morning, you already
know the reason why: because Swalwell — married with three children — has not
only been credibly accused of being an insatiable lecher who preys upon Capitol Hill
women like a one-man plague of locusts; he is also accused of raping one of his former staffers. Yes, the man who once
tweeted #BelieveSurvivors — in direct response to the outrageously
false Julie Swetnick gang-rape allegations during the Kavanaugh hearings, no
less — turns out to have allegedly left behind an angry mob of survivors
himself. (Many of the accusers have come forward under their own names.)
The allegations have not been proven, but if you can
judge a man’s character by his friends, then Swalwell has none whatsoever —
because he no longer has any friends, at least no public ones. That was not the
case until recently: Swalwell had collected endorsements from 21 members of Congress and California’s most important
labor unions (SEIU, California Teachers Association, etc.). Within 24 hours of
the story breaking, every single one of them had rescinded their endorsement of
his gubernatorial bid — almost as if they had been warned in advance that they
might need to do so.
The real sport is now on: the spin game where
partisans and operatives from every California Democratic campaign seek to
blame the other ones for finally putting the Swalwell allegations out there to
the San Francisco Chronicle and CNN; Katie Porter’s people are blaming
Tom Steyer’s people, Steyer’s people are blaming Porter’s, and both are
suspiciously eyeing the dark-horse campaign of San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan. But
honestly, this feels to me a bit like a moral inversion of the old Murder on
the Orient Express scenario: Since every campaign had a righteous
motive, the true guilty parties are whichever campaigns didn’t
knife Swalwell.
Because everybody knew. This is the core fact that we
must always return to. Everybody knew Swalwell was an adulterous lech —
except you. Swalwell’s name was being whispered through the Democratic
grapevine on Capitol Hill by 2017 at the latest, when CNN
almost surely mentioned him as the California representative cited by “more
than half a dozen interviewees independently” for pursuing female staffers. Of
course, CNN didn’t specifically name who they were referring to in that piece —
“because the stories are unverified.”
“Unverified.” Such a curious word. Why not seek
verification of such claims, especially given the number of allegations?
Why such bizarre investigative indifference to a rumored pattern of flagrant
professional sexual abuse from a powerful representative? Why are we first
hearing about Swalwell-as-sex-pest only now?
But whether the media reported on it or not, they knew.
And now they really want us to give them credit for having known, but not told
us. Over the weekend, one journalist after another poured forth smugly from the
woodwork to tsk-tsk about Swalwell and casually aver that everybody knew
and “rumors have swirled in DC for years” — without realizing
what that says about them. One local Northern California journalist claimed that “shortly after being elected to Congress in
2013, [Swalwell’s] behavior towards women was known by all levels of our local
government and the Alameda County Democratic Party.” Golly, thanks for
keeping the rest of us informed.
The pols knew, too. As one who doesn’t typically find
himself guiding readers to the American Prospect, I strongly recommend
this Monday piece by executive editor (and Los Angeleno) David
Dayen, which bluntly laments the “death of accountability” in a D.C. and
California Democratic culture where it was known long ago what Swalwell
was up to: “The truth, which will be available for all to see before long, is
that Swalwell’s conduct with interns, young staff, and female fans was an open
secret for a long time, and yet the party . . . had been supporting him and
raising money for him.” Give Dayen credit for confronting the ugly reality
head-on:
Any of these people who say they
were blindsided by the Swalwell developments are not being entirely credible;
perhaps they’re not even being straight with themselves. . . . They wanted to
ignore the worst whispers about someone in the family. So they did, for over a
decade.
Why? I have no trouble understanding why one of
Swalwell’s rivals would push to get these sexual allegations into the media
before the June election. What I would like explained is why anyone would give
a man with a well-known reputation for predation a pass on it for over a
decade. I have a cheerlessly blunt theory as to why: because, back then, anyone
who had the power to push it as a story had no incentive to make it into one.
As long as Swalwell was content to play “replacement-level representative,” it
apparently didn’t matter whom he might victimize; he was useful. He was useful
during the first Trump term as a sufficiently telegenic talking head; he was useful
during the Biden years as a narrative-pusher. Useful men tend to make friends.
But now he is of no use to anyone — neither his rivals
for power nor a Democratic establishment that desperately seeks not to have
“Literally Worse Than Trump” on the ballot as its candidate in November. And
that’s why he no longer has any friends. We learned recently about the nightmare reality of pedophilia and sexual abuse lurking
behind the glittering myth of “Cesar Chavez, hero of California farm labor.”
For decades, many within Chavez’s organization had known, or at least had
powerful inklings, that something was horribly amiss. The abuses of power were
too noticeable, the whispers ever-present. And yet all involved kept silent
until long after it was too late, because too much was at stake. Chavez
was allowed to get away with horrible crimes and abuses of power simply because
— even in his retirement, even as a symbol — he was useful.
You’re only finding out about Eric Swalwell now because
he is in the way of other Democrats — and easily wounded. It has nothing to do
with morality or accountability, only the interests of political campaigns. And
it makes one wonder who else out there might still be shielded from
accountability — as long as they remain useful.
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