Former U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell burned through more than $75,000 in congressional campaign funds during the first quarter of this year, months after he announced he was done running for his House seat, spending the money on hotels, food, drinks, Uber rides, airfare, and even childcare for his live-in nanny, according to FEC filings first reported by the New York Post.
The spending came after Swalwell told voters in November that he was ending his reelection bid for Congress to pursue the California governor's race instead. Under federal campaign finance law, money raised for an abandoned bid can only go toward limited purposes: winding down office expenses, contributing to other candidates, or donating to charity.
Hotels, restaurant tabs, and ride-hailing charges do not obviously fit any of those categories. And the man racking up the bills was no longer a candidate for the office the donors had funded.
The New York Post reported Saturday, citing FEC filings, that Swalwell's congressional campaign disbursed more than $75,000 in the first quarter. The expenditures included line items for hotels, food, drinks, rides, and airfare. One filing showed $5,091 paid for childcare to Amanda Barbosa, described as Swalwell's live-in Brazilian nanny.
That nanny payment carries its own baggage. The Department of Homeland Security is investigating Eric and Brittany Swalwell over allegations that they employed Barbosa without valid work authorization for two years. Swalwell has not publicly addressed the details of that probe.
Even after the first-quarter spending spree, Swalwell was not running on fumes. The Daily Mail reported that he had more than $288,600 on hand in his campaign coffers, and his leadership PAC, Remedy PAC, was sitting on an additional $32,000 at the end of February.
That means donors who gave to elect Eric Swalwell to Congress still had hundreds of thousands of dollars parked in accounts controlled by a man who had already quit the race. And tens of thousands of those dollars were going toward personal-looking expenses rather than the narrow wind-down purposes the law allows.
The campaign-finance questions land on top of a pile of trouble that has grown fast. Swalwell dismissed sexual misconduct allegations for weeks, but the pressure never let up. On April 10, he posted a video denying the claims head-on.
In that video, Swalwell called the allegations "flat false." When a reporter had earlier pressed him on the matter, his response was blunt, he told the journalist, "Why would you f***ing care?"
The denial did not hold the line. Just days after the April 10 video, Swalwell suspended his campaign for California governor. In the same announcement, he said he was "sorry for mistakes in judgment" and pledged to "fight the serious, false allegations." He also declared his intention to resign from his U.S. House seat.
That sequence, deny, suspend, apologize, resign, unfolded in a matter of days. And it came while fellow Democrats and former staffers were already pressuring him to step down, according to Breitbart News.
Swalwell now faces scrutiny from more than one direction. The DHS investigation into the employment of Barbosa raises potential immigration-law violations. The Manhattan DA has opened its own investigation into sexual assault allegations. And the FEC filings raise questions about whether campaign funds were used for personal benefit, a violation that federal regulators have pursued against members of both parties in the past.
Campaign finance law is specific on this point. Once a candidate abandons a bid, the leftover war chest cannot simply become a personal slush fund. Permissible uses are narrow. Spending $75,000 on hotels, food, drinks, rides, and childcare does not, on its face, look like winding down an office or writing checks to charity.
Swalwell has not offered a public accounting of which expenses he considers legitimate wind-down costs. He has not explained why his defunct campaign was paying for Uber rides and hotel stays months after he left the race. And he has not addressed how childcare payments to a nanny under DHS investigation qualify under any recognized category of permissible post-campaign spending.
Swalwell built a national profile as one of the loudest voices on government accountability, a congressman who sat on the Intelligence Committee and never missed a chance to lecture political opponents about ethics. He faced a lawsuit over his California residency as he launched his gubernatorial bid, adding yet another legal cloud to a career already shadowed by his earlier association with a suspected Chinese intelligence operative.
Now, with his House career ending, his governor's race dead, and investigations open on multiple fronts, the spending disclosures paint a picture of a politician who treated donor money as a personal expense account even after the campaign that raised it no longer existed.
The $288,600 still sitting in his campaign coffers, plus the $32,000 in Remedy PAC, means the story is not over. How that money gets spent, or returned, or donated, will tell voters whether Swalwell treats the law as something that applies to him, or only to the people he used to investigate from his committee perch.
Swalwell pushed back on misconduct rumors throughout his brief gubernatorial campaign, insisting he was the victim of political sabotage. But FEC filings are not rumors. They are numbers, filed under penalty of law, and these numbers tell a story that no amount of indignation can wave away.
Several facts remain unclear. The specific hotels and restaurants where the money was spent have not been publicly identified. The exact dates and amounts of individual transactions beyond the $5,091 childcare payment have not been broken out in available reporting. The procedural status of the DHS investigation, whether it has advanced beyond a preliminary inquiry, is not known.
What is known is that a sitting congressman quit his race, kept spending donor money on lifestyle expenses, employed a nanny who may have lacked work authorization, denied serious allegations with profanity before abruptly folding his campaign, and still controls more than $320,000 in political funds.
When a politician lectures the country about accountability for years and then treats campaign donations like a personal credit card, the money trail tells you everything the speeches never did.