Documents and timelines released in recent weeks sketch a chilling pattern: a federal law enforcement agency that prioritized certain investigations while downplaying or dismissing others, raising serious questions about bias, secrecy, and internal power networks within the FBI.
The newly released material makes the arc of events feel less like coincidence and more like a long, deliberate funneling of resources and narrative. Once you stack the memos, emails, and internal notes side by side, a consistent pattern of choices and omissions emerges that demands scrutiny. These are not isolated mistakes; they read like institutional priorities handed down and executed over a span of years.
The Steele dossier saga and the whole Russian collusion narrative show how a flimsy case was amplified by powerful actors and sympathetic outlets. Senior intelligence officials pushed an assessment that fit a story the media wanted to run, even as key pieces failed to hold up under scrutiny. The result was a months-long campaign that turned speculation into a national narrative despite repeated debunks.
At the same time, the FBI’s handling of foreign influence cases involving Democrats and associates, including the Hunter Biden material, looks strikingly different from its approach to Trump-related leads. The bureau collected and held the laptop material for months, and internal commentary from analysts acknowledged its authenticity, yet the public posture labeled much of the reporting as disinformation. That selective posture allowed certain threads to be minimized while other lines of inquiry were pursued aggressively.
The Swalwell investigation into Christine Fang, the alleged Chinese intelligence associate, is a case study in that contrast. Records show the FBI opened an investigation and found troubling links: alleged physical relations, straw donations traceable to Fang, and interns placed in congressional offices via her referrals. Despite those findings, the case against Swalwell was narrowed and then dropped, while other investigations with weaker evidentiary bases were pursued to the full extent of the agency’s power.
Many of the FBI’s abuses of power have been reported before. There was coverage of how the FBI received warrants to spy on Trump aide Carter Page based on a July 2016 email that the Bureau, in five separate interviews, never once asked Page about. Reporters covered the FBI’s claim in its warrant application that Page had “met with” senior Russian officials when he had, in fact, only shaken a deputy prime minister’s hand, and spoken briefly with a staffer. And journalists wrote about how the Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz documented 17 significant inaccuracies and omissions across four FISA applications targeting Page.
But now, new files released today reveal that the FBI walked away from a far stronger case against Rep. Eric Swalwell. The FBI opened its investigation in 2014 and named as its objective to “obtain sufficient evidence to indict and arrest Swalwell and Fang for violations of campaign finance laws and quid pro quo exchanges.” Christine Fang, known as Fang Fang, was a Chinese national whose parents the FBI identified as “known MSS intelligence officers,” a reference to China’s Ministry of State Security, that nation’s equivalent to the CIA.
The new files show Swalwell admitted to FBI agents that he had “physical relations with Fang” on multiple occasions. They also show that he confirmed that Fang referred interns to him, whom his staff placed in his campaign and congressional offices. And agents traced 2013 straw donations through conduits back “to Fang herself,” making her, in the Bureau’s words, an “illegal source of campaign contributions.” And yet on February 8, 2017, the FBI dropped Swalwell as a subject and narrowed the case to Fang alone.
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To be clear, no evidence shows Swalwell committed any crime, and the FBI may have judged his case correctly…But judged against the FBI’s treatment of Trump, there is a clear double standard. Standard counterintelligence practice called for a defensive briefing, like the one the FBI gave Swallwell. The FBI gave a similar defensive briefing against Hillary Clinton. The FBI neither gave Trump nor Page any similar defensive briefing on its Crossfire Hurricane investigation. On the contrary, the FBI interviewed Page five times without ever asking him about the evidence it intended to use to justify a warrant to spy on him.
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There was far more evidence of Chinese influence over Swalwell than Russian influence over Trump or anyone in his campaign. Where the accusations of sexual blackmail in the former UK spy’s memos were false, Swalwell admitted to the FBI a sexual relationship with a suspected Chinese intelligence operative. Where the FBI never traced illegal foreign contributions into the Trump campaign, the suspected Chinese spy bundled money for Swallwell’s campaign and placed interns in his office. And where the FBI offered the UK spy $1 million dollars to prove his allegations, which he couldn’t, the Bureau and its allies in the press spent years painting Trump as a Russian asset.
Meanwhile, since at least 2019, the FBI told lawmakers, the media, and ultimately American voters that evidence of Biden family influence peddling was Russian disinformation. The FBI had possessed the laptop’s hard drive since December 2019 and knew the material was real. “Yes, the laptop is real,” an intelligence analyst said inside the Bureau the morning the New York Post story broke, according to testimony from FBI Section Chief Laura Dehmlow. The FBI knew the FBI was real and spread disinformation, through defensive briefings leaked to the media, that anyone who pointed out the obvious — that Hunter Biden ran an elaborate influence-peddling operation, including to the Chinese government — was spreading Russian disinformation.
And consider just how much evidence there was of foreign efforts to influence Hillary Clinton. Beginning in late 2014, the FBI learned from a well-placed confidential source that a foreign government planned to send an individual to contribute to Clinton’s anticipated campaign “as a way to gain influence with Clinton should she win the presidency.”
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Instead of investigating Biden, the FBI spread disinformation attacking those who asked questions about his influence peddling. In December 2019, one month after an FBI field office took possession of Hunter Biden’s laptop hard drives, analysts on the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force-Russia formed an unofficial group to gather all derogatory confidential source reporting on Joe Biden, Burisma, and Ukraine “to red flag the reporting as Russian disinformation.” An FBI spreadsheet released with the documents listed mostly Democrats, including Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, and Barack Obama, as “targets” of Russian disinformation, and mostly Republicans, with Giuliani first and Rep. Jim Jordan eighth, as “conduits.” The FBI person who ran the investigation later texted colleagues to say she was “basically running a shadow government across the FBI.” She reported to Director Christopher Wray “routinely, if not daily.”
Those internal messages and the pattern of selective focus have left many asking the same blunt question: was the FBI operating like a political police force? The evidence released so far points to decisions that favored certain political interests while sidelining others, and that is an ugly conclusion to accept for any institution that is supposed to be neutral. The timeline matters because it shows this wasn’t an isolated lapse but a sustained posture across years and administrations.
The agency’s behavior from 2015 through 2019, and beyond, suggests priorities set by culture and personnel rather than by consistent law enforcement standards. That culture let some investigations stall and others balloon into full-scale operations at speed, with real consequences for American politics and public trust. When investigations become tools for selective pressure, the rule of law takes damage.
Control of the FBI is still a contested question. Leadership can change, but entrenched networks and institutional inertia remain. The new disclosures will keep coming, and each one will add pieces to the picture of how decisions were made and who benefited from them. Whatever conclusions people draw, the material already out in the open demands independent review and a clear explanation.
Operation Round River and the other programs now under scrutiny deserve careful, transparent oversight. The public has a right to know why certain paths were pursued aggressively while others were quietly set aside, who signed off on those choices, and how to prevent similar imbalances in the future. The stakes are the integrity of federal law enforcement and the basic fairness of our political system.
