House impeachment manager Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) told the San Francisco Chronicle that he is ready for a return to bipartisanship, after he played a leading role in two successive, and failed, efforts to impeach President Donald Trump.
In 2019, Swalwell was part of the House Intelligence Committee’s shadowy inquiry into the president, much of which took place behind closed doors. At one point, Swalwell lied about what a witness had said about Trump having broken the law.
In 2021, Swalwell joined Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) in presenting the case against Trump during the Senate impeachment trial. He was accused by Trump’s lawyers of having falsified evidence, after presenting a tweet that had been doctored.
In addition, Swalwell has been linked to an alleged Chinese spy named Christine Fang, or Fang Fang. He has declined to answer questions about his personal relationship with her. He remains on the House Intelligence Committee, regardless.
Still, Swalwell told the Chronicle that he is ready to go back to where he claims he began, in the “center” of politics:
“The trial was a way for me to go back to the 31-year-old prosecutor who ran for Congress and whose career before going to Congress was presenting just the facts to the jury,” Swalwell said. “In a way it was a little bit liberating, in that I think we’re now at the end of Donald Trump’s accountability before the Congress, and I look forward to going back to why I ran for Congress in the first place, which was to get things done with anyone who wants to work with me.”
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“If you look at when I ran for Congress … I ran against a pretty liberal member of Congress and I promised to work in the great big center,” Swalwell said. “Before Trump, two-thirds of the legislation I sponsored was bipartisan, and it was when he came into office — for me it wasn’t about partisanship, it was that what I had learned as the son of a cop and a prosecutor was tested, just doing the right thing. That’s why I was so vocal about it.”
The Chronicle reports, without elaborating, that Swalwell is the victim of unspecified allegations by his opponents: “Republicans have latched on to unfounded accusations against him to draw false equivalences.” The sentence appears to be a reference to Fang.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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