FBI Raids Beverly Hills Mansion Tied To Eric Swalwell Probe

FBI agents searched a Beverly Hills mansion on Tuesday morning as part of the criminal investigation of former Rep. Eric Swalwell, Fox News reports. FBI spokesperson Lourdes Arocho told the Los Angeles Times: “We are executing a search warrant. Court documents are sealed. No arrests are planned.”

Fox identified the home as belonging to billionaire Stephen Cloobeck, a longtime Swalwell supporter. CNN’s sources said only that it is owned by a Swalwell donor, and the Times placed the search on North Roxbury Drive. None of the early reports says what agents were looking for or whether anything was taken, and none carries a response from Swalwell, his lawyer or Cloobeck.

Cloobeck has his own legal trouble. The Diamond Resorts founder hosted and bankrolled Swalwell at the same Beverly Hills house, then broke with him after the misconduct allegations surfaced. He surrendered in West Hollywood on May 12 on felony counts of trying to dissuade witnesses in the theft case against his fiancée, Adva Lavie, according to NBC Los Angeles, and was released on $300,000 bail. His attorney, Elias Dabaie, said: “These charges are false and we look forward to our day in court.”

The Times reports that federal prosecutors are using civil rights law to examine Swalwell’s conduct as a member of Congress. Court records cited by the paper show that in August investigators sought his white iPhone and MacBook Pro as part of an inquiry into whether he violated the federal statute that makes it a crime to willfully deprive a person of constitutional rights while acting under government authority. A source told the Times his home was also searched this summer under a warrant tied to that inquiry.

That August sequence began when agents seized his devices at San Francisco International Airport and searched his Washington home the next day. Mediaite, citing The Atlantic, adds that federal air marshals reportedly watched Swalwell on an Aug. 8 flight to Frankfurt at the FBI’s request because the bureau wanted his device passcodes. It is unclear whether that worked.

Swalwell resigned from Congress in April and quit the governor’s race after multiple women accused him of sexual misconduct. Fox counts at least five accusers, one of them a former staffer who says he raped her. Swalwell has denied the allegations, and he has not been charged. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department are running separate criminal investigations.

The probe has another thread. In August the White House’s Government Transparency Task Force released declassified FBI records on Christine “Fang Fang” Fang, a suspected Chinese intelligence operative. In them, Swalwell told agents he had “physical relations” with Fang on a handful of occasions, the last in March 2015. The FBI interviewed him about it in May 2015 and March 2016, and it removed him as a subject of that investigation in 2017.

The warrant is sealed and no charges have been announced, so what agents wanted from the Beverly Hills house is still unknown.