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Eric Swalwell’s Political Life Is Over – So Is His Personal Life and He May Even Lose His Freedom

Updated: CORRUPTION

This couldn’t have happened to a better Trump-deranged anti-America jerk.

For years the political press treated now-former California Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell’s problems as a partisan mirage — the Chinese-spy business, the ethics questions, all of it waved off as a right-wing obsession. It turns out the most damning verdict on Swalwell wasn’t going to come from Republicans, or the FBI, or a House ethics panel. It came from the woman who married him. By multiple accounts, his wife, Brittany Watts, is done, and that quiet exit says more than any hearing ever did.

The signs have been piling up in plain sight. Watts has been spotted without her wedding ring for a good while now, and reports have the couple living separate lives after nearly a decade of marriage and three children together. Newsmax hosts have flatly called it: she’s out. There will be no farewell tour, no soft-focus profile, no explanation owed to anyone. She simply stopped wearing the ring.

And who could blame her? Consider the highlight reel her husband compiled. This is the man reportedly caught sending women videos of himself pleasuring himself, along with a stream of unsolicited explicit Snapchat messages — while married. The same Snapchat, incidentally, he joined back in 2016 while grandly announcing it would “restore faith in democracy.” The faith-restoration project apparently had a private channel.

Then there’s the FBI, which stopped him at San Francisco International Airport in August and later searched his Washington home, hauling off his electronic devices. Reports connect the probe to allegations of sexual misconduct — multiple women, unsolicited nude photos, the whole grubby catalog. He hasn’t been charged, and he’s owed the presumption of innocence. But a wife doesn’t need a grand jury to reach a verdict on her own marriage, and by every indication, she has.

Layer in the original scandal that made him famous for the wrong reasons: the years-long closeness to Fang Fang, the suspected Chinese operative who fundraised for him and got an intern into his office before the FBI stepped in. Imagine being the spouse who has to absorb that a foreign spy was once part of your husband’s inner circle — and then watch the rest of it unfold on cable news, one sordid installment at a time.

Notice, too, who gets the sympathy in stories like this and who doesn’t. The professional feminist class that manufactures hashtags for far less deserving figures has nothing to offer Brittany Watts — no vigil, no solidarity, no hearts held to the sky. A woman quietly walking away from a serial embarrassment with three kids in tow doesn’t fit the script, so she gets silence.

So this is how the Swalwell saga reaches its most honest chapter: not with a conviction or a censure, but with an empty ring finger. Two marriages now behind him, a congressional career curdled, a governor’s run that evaporated, and a wife who looked at the whole spectacle and made the only sensible call left. She answered the question everyone was too polite to ask. Bye.