Trump administration officials have ordered F.B.I. agents to gather documents about a decade-old investigation into a Democratic congressman and his ties to a suspected Chinese spy, according to people familiar with the matter.
The effort has alarmed law enforcement officials who said they feared the material could be released publicly to smear the lawmaker, Representative Eric Swalwell, a prominent critic of President Trump who is now running for governor of California.
The investigation dates from more than a decade ago, when F.B.I. counterintelligence agents looked into a Chinese woman, Christine Fang, or Fang Fang, who assisted Mr. Swalwell with fund-raising. The F.B.I. concluded the investigation, and the Justice Department did not bring any criminal charges.
In recent days, scores of F.B.I. agents and other personnel in California were instructed to gather the documents on Mr. Swalwell and Ms. Fang, with the goal of working through the weekend to finish a review by early next week, the people said. Supervisors advised the agents to lightly redact the records to obscure some sensitive information and told them the files would be shared with senior administration officials in Washington.
The order from F.B.I. leadership has alarmed some career investigators, partly because the files are extensive and contain a significant amount of classified material and private information, the people said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss orders intended to remain secret.
A Justice Department spokesman and the White House referred questions to the F.B.I. A bureau spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The F.B.I. and Justice Department do not normally release derogatory information collected during an investigation about people if the subjects were not charged with any crime. There are occasional exceptions to that practice, including when Congress passed a law last year forcing the release of millions of pages from F.B.I. files about the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Some law enforcement personnel have expressed concern at what would remain unredacted and whether senior officials would misuse the material to score political points, perhaps by publicly releasing it, the people said. They added that the agency was expending significant resources on what appears to be a political errand.
Ms. Fang left the United States for China in 2015, possibly because she had learned about the counterintelligence investigation into whether she was a spy. Mr. Swalwell has denied wrongdoing, and law enforcement officials have not presented any evidence that he knew of anything amiss about Ms. Fang.
In 2023, the House Ethics Committee ended a two-year investigation into the relationship between Mr. Swalwell and Ms. Fang without taking any further action.
But Mr. Trump and his supporters have long pointed to the case to accuse the lawmaker of being a pawn of Chinese intelligence operatives.
“We now know the outrageous ends the White House will go to target political opponents,” Mr. Swalwell said in a statement on Saturday. “The reason Trump is so desperately trying to stop me is not because I’m running for governor of California, but because now I’m the favorite.”
“But Donald Trump and Kash Patel do not get to pick the next governor,” he added.
The Washington Post earlier reported on the F.B.I.’s orders to revisit the old case.
As a member of the House Judiciary Committee, which exercises oversight of the Justice Department and F.B.I., Mr. Swalwell has long clashed with the Trump administration.
In a hearing in September, Mr. Swalwell pressed Kash Patel, the bureau’s director, on why the F.B.I. had not released more documents on its investigation years ago into Mr. Epstein, a well-connected businessman who was indicted in 2019 on charges of trafficking underage girls for sex.
Mr. Patel yelled at Mr. Swalwell, denouncing his career as “a disgrace to the American people.”
Mr. Swalwell has also earned Mr. Trump’s ire because of his vocal criticism of the president and his administration’s policies.
He has often denounced Mr. Trump’s role in the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, and is among several Democrats appointed by Democratic leadership to a Republican-led House subcommittee that was formed to revise the historical record of those events. The Democrats on the subcommittee intend to try to compel it to stick to an accurate version of the day’s violence.
“Donald Trump is on a war path to rewrite that history,” Mr. Swalwell said in September after joining the subcommittee. “He has pardoned the insurrectionists, vilified the cops who defended us, attacked those who investigated him and even forced the Smithsonian to whitewash the record.”
In 2021, Mr. Swalwell filed a lawsuit against Mr. Trump and several allies that accuses them of inciting the attack on the Capitol and conspiring with rioters to try to prevent Congress from formalizing Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.
Last November, Mr. Swalwell criticized the Trump administration after reports said Bill Pulte, the Trump-appointed director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, had accused Mr. Swalwell of mortgage and tax fraud and had referred him to the Justice Department for a potential criminal investigation. Mr. Swalwell filed a lawsuit against Mr. Pulte but dropped that this month.
The Trump administration has also pursued criminal investigations of a number of the president’s perceived enemies, including Letitia James, New York’s attorney general; Senator Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California; James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director; and Jerome H. Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve.
Many of those efforts have faltered. The Justice Department brought criminal charges against Ms. James and Mr. Comey, but the cases were thrown out after a judge determined that the prosecutor who brought them had been unlawfully appointed.
Mr. Swalwell first came into contact with Ms. Fang when he was a council member in the city of Dublin, Calif., before being elected to the House in 2012, according to an Axios article from 2020. Since her days as a university student in the Bay Area, Ms. Fang had developed ties to a wide range of American politicians, including at least two mayors in the Midwest. Her activities eventually drew the interest of counterintelligence agents at the F.B.I.
In 2015, agents gave Mr. Swalwell a briefing about their suspicions of Ms. Fang, who they believed was acting under the direction of China’s main spy agency, the Ministry of State Security. Mr. Swalwell in turn severed his ties to her. She left for China that year.
Ms. Fang could not be reached for comment.
In 2024, Hu Xijin, the former editor in chief of Global Times, a Chinese Communist Party newspaper, posted online a photo of him and Ms. Fang having lunch. He wrote that she had gone to the United States in 2009 to study and “did a lot of work to promote personnel exchanges” between the two nations. Then in 2015, he wrote, the C.I.A. and F.B.I. approached her and tried to get her to work for them through coercion and bribery.
She fled the country three days after a “showdown” with the F.B.I., he said, and “in the end, her dreams were shattered.”
Edward Wong reports on global affairs, U.S. foreign policy and the State Department for The Times.
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