California Collusion Crusader

As Katy Grimes reported, California Democrat Eric Swalwell has been on a gun-control crusade, calling for a total ban on what he calls “assault weapons” and buying back the semiautomatic rifles from law-abiding citizens who legally purchased them.

Before targeting gun owners, the presidential candidate’s favorite cause was the Russia collusion story. In television appearances, Rep. Swalwell has deployed tactics that might be found strange in the California courtrooms where the candidate used to make his living.

Eric Swalwell was born in 1980, the same year Trump critic Angela Davis, winner of the Lenin Peace Prize, first ran for vice president with the Communist Party, under white Stalinist Gus Hall. Swalwell attended the University of Maryland, College Park, where he earned his JD. He served on the city council in College Park then interned in Alameda County, California, where he served as a deputy district attorney. In 2012 Swalwell defeated Democrat Pete Stark and has been the representative for California’s 15th district since January, 2013.

“Less than a decade later, Swalwell is employing the same skills he honed in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office to publicly lay out the Russia collusion case involving President Donald Trump, his family, and his former campaign surrogates.” That was Robert Gammon in a 2017 Oakland Magazine article headlined “Prosecuting the President.” In that quest, Swalwell had become “one of the most sought-after figures on cable news.”

In a March 26 appearance on Fox News, Martha MacCallum asked Swalwell if he had any second thoughts about things he had said in the two years before release of the Mueller report that found no collusion. Swalwell drew a blank and MacCallum pressed the case of the infamous dossier. Swalwell turned the tables and asked what in the dossier had been found false.

As a stunned MacCallum explained, the dossier said attorney Michael Cohen had plotted collusion in Prague, but in sworn testimony Cohen said he had never been to Prague or to the Czech republic. Swalwell then launched a harangue on Cohen and essentially restated fidelity to the collusion narrative.

A district attorney would have a hard time convincing a jury by ignoring sworn testimony that contradicted his own biases. That is what Swalwell did with Michael Cohen’s absence from Prague. In similar style, a prosecutor would not win over a jury by making repeating claims of substantive evidence he failed to produce.

That was what former prosecutor Adam Schiff has been doing for the past three years, and like Swalwell he has no second thoughts about any of it. As observers might note, Schiff and Swalwell did not deploy their prosecutorial and investigative skills with regard to the Clinton Foundation or Hillary’s missing 30,000 emails, all under subpoena.

In his television appearances, Eric Swalwell betrays cognitive dissonance and shows strong contempt for established truth. If observers find that strange for a former district attorney who wants to be president, it would be hard to blame them.