President Donald Trump’s Justice Department raided a Beverly Hills mansion believed to belong to a billionaire who bankrolled former Rep. Eric Swalwell, Fox News and other conservative outlets first reported.
FBI agents searched the home Tuesday morning as part of the federal investigation into Swalwell, Fox News reported. Fox correspondent Matt Finn wrote on X that the house is “believed to be” billionaire Stephen Cloobeck’s mansion. CNN reported the search too, citing two people familiar with the probe, one of whom said the home belongs to a Swalwell donor. Neither outlet said what agents were looking for.
Cloobeck ran for governor before dropping out to make way for Swalwell, then spent more than $1 million supporting his campaign and let him stay at the mansion, the New York Post reported. Swalwell recorded his video denying sexual misconduct allegations inside the home, and Cloobeck cut ties with him after the allegations surfaced, according to the Post.
“I am no longer associated with a man that takes advantage of women,” Cloobeck said, according to the Post.
Swalwell, a California Democrat, resigned from Congress and quit the governor’s race in April after CNN and the San Francisco Chronicle reported allegations of sexual misconduct, including from a former staffer who said he raped her. He has denied the allegations while acknowledging “mistakes in judgment.” Besides the federal probe, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department have opened criminal investigations.
In August, federal agents seized Swalwell’s electronic devices at San Francisco International Airport and searched his Washington home the next day. The warrant cited a civil rights law most often used against police officers who abuse their power, the San Francisco Standard reported.
A legal column in the conservative National Review called that theory “a stretch.” The column pointed out that the former staffer says the 2024 assault happened after she left his office, when she was no longer his subordinate.
“These are the kinds of allegations, however serious they may be, that federal prosecutors would not normally pursue,” the column said.
Swalwell was “one of President Donald Trump’s chief antagonists,” the Washington Examiner, a conservative outlet, wrote in August. Attorney General Todd Blanche said last week, “I work for President Trump,” Axios reported.
The investigation of a top Trump critic is being run by an attorney general who says he works for the president.
Tuesday’s search came one week before the Nov. 3 midterm elections. The Justice Department has long observed an informal 60- or 90-day period of “heightened caution” before elections, though no blanket ban exists, and its written rules bar timing investigations to influence elections, Axios reported.
Swalwell is not on the ballot, but the search is one of several federal actions against Democrats in the final weeks of the campaign, including an Oct. 12 search of Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (D-MN) home and the Oct. 22 indictment of Virginia state Sen. Louise Lucas (D-VA), who denies wrongdoing. Blanche has dismissed the unwritten convention and says the department does not do “political paybacks.”