Federal agents hit a Beverly Hills mansion Tuesday morning in connection with the ongoing investigation into former Rep. Eric Swalwell. The California Democrat spent years as a cable-news fixture calling for investigations into everyone but himself. Now the FBI is circling properties tied to him while multiple women, including a former staffer, have accused him of sexual misconduct and rape.
Fox News reported that the raid targets a mansion in Beverly Hills and is related to the sexual misconduct probe. Swalwell was not arrested or detained. This follows an August operation in which agents searched his Washington, D.C., home and seized his iPhone and MacBook at San Francisco International Airport. Court papers and sources have described the federal inquiry as examining civil-rights statutes, including 18 U.S.C. § 242, which covers deprivation of rights under color of law.
Swalwell resigned from Congress in April after 13 years and abandoned his bid for California governor once the accusations became public. At least five women came forward. One former staffer told the San Francisco Chronicle he sexually assaulted her on multiple occasions, including when she was too intoxicated to consent. Other women described unsolicited explicit messages and photos.
Swalwell called the serious claims “flat out false” and said he would fight them, while acknowledging “mistakes in judgment” and apologizing to his family, staff, and constituents. The House Ethics Committee opened an investigation. He left office under the threat of expulsion.
Beverly Hills Accuser and Local Prosecutors
One of the most detailed public accounts came from Lonna Drewes, a Beverly Hills woman and former model who held a news conference with attorneys including Lisa Bloom. She alleged that in July 2018 Swalwell invited her to a political event, took her to his West Hollywood hotel room under the pretext of retrieving paperwork, then drugged, raped, and choked her until she lost consciousness.
“He raped me. And he choked me. And while he was choking me, I lost consciousness. And I thought I died,” she said. “I did not consent to any sexual activity.”
Los Angeles County Sheriff’s investigators forwarded the case to the district attorney’s sex-crimes unit in September. As of mid-October, prosecutors were still weighing charges. Manhattan authorities have also examined a separate allegation tied to a 2024 New York gala.
Campaign finance records showed Swalwell’s 2018 re-election effort paid the Montrose hotel on the same date Drewes described. Swalwell’s lawyers have maintained he is innocent and that the facts will clear him.
The Fang Fang Documents
The Beverly Hills raid arrived days after the White House’s Government Transparency Task Force released declassified FBI records on Swalwell’s relationship with Christine “Fang Fang” Fang, a Chinese national suspected of ties to the Ministry of State Security.
In interviews with agents in May 2015 and March 2016, Swalwell admitted to “physical relations” with Fang on a handful of occasions, the last in March 2015. He described the encounters as casual, said they never dated, and recalled one instance in which Fang showed up at his apartment late at night; he had taken Ambien and barely remembered what followed. Fang had volunteered on his campaign, referred interns through the Asian Pacific Islander American Public Affairs Association, and was investigated for routing prohibited foreign-national contributions through U.S.-citizen conduits.
The FBI codenamed the case “Freshman Fifteen.” Agents later removed Swalwell as a subject after finding no evidence of a quid-pro-quo corruption violation by him, though Fang herself was found to have violated election laws before fleeing the country.
Swalwell sat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence during part of this period. When Kevin McCarthy later sought to remove him from the panel, senior Democrats dismissed the concerns as “pernicious nonsense” and a “frivolous, political exercise.” The newly public files show the FBI had briefed leadership and possessed details of the sexual relationship, the intern placements, and the conduit donations years earlier. Pelosi and others kept him in place.
“Swalwell had a drink with Fang a couple weeks after they first met in 2012. He had physical relations with Fang on a handful of occasions, but never dated her or had a romantic relationship. March 2015 was the last time Swalwell had physical relations with Fang.”
That is from the declassified FBI summary, as reported by Fox News and Just the News. The same documents note that Fang joked about the MSS and that Swalwell himself once remarked, in a joking manner, that she might be associated with the “Chinese CIA.”
Accountability After the Open Secret
For years the pattern was treated as an open secret in Washington. Multiple women waited until the allegations broke in the press before law enforcement moved in earnest. Local prosecutors in Los Angeles and Manhattan opened cases. Federal agents seized devices and searched residences. Now a Beverly Hills mansion is in the mix.
Swalwell has denied the assault claims and vowed to fight them. The public record, including his own admissions about Fang, shows a man who mixed power, access, and personal conduct in ways that alarmed counterintelligence officers long before the sexual-misconduct reports surfaced.
When a member of Congress faces credible accusations from multiple women and has already admitted intimate contact with a suspected foreign intelligence operative while holding a sensitive committee seat, the proper response is not partisan protection or cable-news deflection. It is investigation, evidence, and consequences. The FBI’s latest action in Beverly Hills is one more step in that process. Whether it ends in charges or further revelations, the days of treating this as a media story that can be managed away appear to be over.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.