FBI Seizes Swalwell's Phone and Laptop; No Charges

He specifically denied the assault alleged by Lonna Drewes, a California woman who said publicly in April that Swalwell raped her at a Southern California hotel in 2018, according to the AP.

The seven-term congressman, elected in 2012 to a district east of San Francisco, had been seen as one of the leading candidates in California's governor's race before dropping out. California lawmaker Aisha Wahab won a special election Thursday to serve the remainder of his House term, which ends in January.

What is not established

The purpose of the warrants beyond the misconduct probe has not been made public. The New York Post reported that legal experts it interviewed raised the question of whether investigators are examining alleged efforts to intimidate or silence witnesses; that is speculation by outside lawyers, not a stated finding by prosecutors.

Coverage of the searches also split on what the FBI is investigating. The AP's sourcing ties the warrants to the sexual misconduct allegations. Nexstar station WKBN, among others, reported the searches as part of an investigation into Swalwell's ties to a suspected Chinese spy. The Frank has seen no court filing resolving that discrepancy.

Separately, the White House this week released nearly 100 pages of what it called declassified records from an FBI counterintelligence probe into Swalwell's interactions with a woman authorities believe may be a foreign intelligence operative, The Center Square reported. Then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy removed Swalwell from the House Intelligence Committee in 2023 over his contact with Christine Fang, a suspected Chinese spy. Federal investigators alerted Swalwell to their concerns and briefed Congress in 2015, and Swalwell says he cut off contact with her then. He was not accused of wrongdoing, and a House Ethics Committee investigation opened in 2021 closed two years later without action, according to the AP.