FBI Briefs House Leaders on Rep. Swalwell’s Links to Purported Chinese Spy

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) speaks at a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington on Dec. 3, 2020. (Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said he and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) were briefed on Friday about a Chinese Communist spy’s alleged relationship with a Democratic member of Congress.

McCarthy told Fox News that Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.)—who was the subject of an explosive Axios report detailing how a young female spy named Fang Fang was allegedly able to get into his inner circle—shouldn’t be allowed on the House Intelligence Committee.

“He should not be on Intel,” McCarthy told reporters after meeting with the FBI. “I just think there are definitely 200 other Democrats that I know could fill that place,” McCarthy added.

Pelosi, after the briefing, did not speak with reporters, according to Fox and other news outlets.

Last week, the speaker said, “I don’t have any concern about Mr. Swalwell” and attempted to frame the allegations against the California representative as politically motivated attacks from Republicans.

Swalwell himself has offered few public comments since the Axios report broke. The Epoch Times reached out to his office for comment.

Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) speaks during the California Democrats 2019 State Convention at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, Calif., on June 1, 2019. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

“Rep. Swalwell, long ago, provided information about this person—whom he met more than eight years ago, and whom he hasn’t seen in nearly six years—to the FBI,” Swalwell’s office told Axios earlier this month.

But the statement didn’t stop Republicans in the House, including several GOP leaders, from asking Pelosi to remove Swalwell from the House Intelligence Committee. Democrats on the panel, led by Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), were heavily involved in the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump last year—and the panel was a key player in the allegations that Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia in 2016 before a special prosecutor found there was no evidence of the sort.

Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe has been issuing more and more warnings about the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), namely about its schemes to influence members of Congress.

“China already suppresses U.S. web content that threatens the Communist Party’s ideological control, and it is developing offensive cyber capabilities against the U.S. homeland,” he wrote in a Dec. 3 opinion article for the Wall Street Journal. “This year China engaged in a massive influence campaign that included targeting several dozen members of Congress and congressional aides.”

Going further, Ratcliffe wrote that U.S. “intelligence shows that Beijing regularly directs this type of influence operation in the U.S. I briefed the House and Senate Intelligence committees that China is targeting members of Congress with six times the frequency of Russia and 12 times the frequency of Iran.”

Before that, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in February warned that the CCP is targeting the governors of all 50 states and has labeled each governor as “friendly,” “hardline,” or “ambiguous.” He said the regime uses the CCP’s “Chinese People’s Association For Friendship and Foreign Countries,” which is effectively the country’s “official foreign influence agency.”