Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) responded to House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy’s threat to remove him from his position on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) if McCarthy becomes Speaker of the House.
“He will not be serving there,” McCarthy said about Swalwell’s service on the HPSCI in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News. Swalwell said in response to McCarthy’s threats:
McCarthy is targeting me for 1 reason: I’m effective. He wants to carry water (& sort Starbursts) for Trump’s Big Lie & not be called out. He’s projecting onto me b/c he’s incapable of facing down the Ku Klux Klan elements in his caucus. If he thinks he’s silencing me, he’s not.
Swalwell came under fire in December 2020 after it was revealed he had a long-running affair with a woman named Fang Fang, whom intelligence community officials identified as a Chinese Communist Party spy.
Swalwell is not the only prominent Democrat McCarthy plans to divest of their committee assignments.
McCarthy said that as Speaker of the House, he would also strip Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Adam Schiff of their committee assignments, citing certain controversies and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) unprecedented refusal to seat McCarthy’s nominations for the January 6 select committee.
“You look at Adam Schiff—he should not be serving on Intel when he has openly, knowingly now used a fake dossier, lied to the American public in the process, and doesn’t have any ill will [and] says he wants to continue to do it,” McCarthy said.
McCarthy added that “Ilhan Omar should not be serving on Foreign Affairs.” Omar has consistently made antisemitic comments about Israel, a key Middle East ally of the U.S., and said “some people did something,” about 9/11.
A spokesperson for Rep. Omar declined to comment, according to Axios.