Last week, Washington saw two members of Congress depart — figures most observers would argue were justifiably shown the door. Now, fresh allegations against Rep. Cory Mills (R-Fla.) have Capitol Hill bracing for another potential reckoning, with talk of expulsion circulating. None of this is surprising to anyone who has spent real time covering this city.
When the Eric Swalwell news broke, I was hardly surprised — the rape allegations were news to me, but his reputation around women was not.
In the spring of 2021, I watched him get handsy with people I know at a bar in the Northeast part of the city, and I’m aware of women he added on Snapchat and texted late at night who found his behavior unprofessionally flirtatious. Washington’s worst-kept secret isn’t any particular scandal. It’s the ecosystem that quietly enables all of them.
The Hill creates something close to a perfect storm. Much of Congress is filled with people who, frankly, weren’t the most popular kids in high school or college, who suddenly find themselves surrounded by young staffers, interns and lobbyists impressed by their power. They’re away from their families a significant chunk of the year, constantly attending events fueled by open bars, insulated by staff whose instinct is to protect their bosses at all costs. The press corps, to some extent, has to quietly do the mental math on whether any given piece of information is worth blowing up a good source relationship over or could spark legal issues, which rounds it out into a pretty ideal environment for bad behavior to go unchecked.
Some colleagues even run interference for each other. More on that shortly.
I wish I could say scandals like this shock me. They don’t, because I’ve watched these things unfold in real time.
A then-close friend — I’ll call her MK, a political fundraiser with a well-connected family and a flair for drama — came with me to a social gathering that included then-House Homeland Security Chairman Mark Green (R-Tenn.) and a handful of other lawmakers in the fall of 2023. She got heavily intoxicated. The next morning she told me she was a little embarrassed about how the night went. Green, a married congressman old enough to be her father, had been “pretty cool,” she said.
About a week later, Green hosted a small informal party at his house between vote series — a few members, a couple of reporters, nothing out of the ordinary. Reporters grab drinks with members all the time. They’re often genuinely fun to be around, and if you cover the Hill, schmoozing is helpful in terms of getting scoops. That night, though, MK showed up and got obliterated. We’re talking trying-to-sit-on-lawmakers’-laps-and-stroke-their-arms level of obliterated. When one brushed her off, she simply moved to the next. It was a lot, and I was growing increasingly uneasy about what it might mean for my professional reputation.
At one point, she and Green were all over each other. Another congressman and I locked eyes, mutually stunned by what was happening. I tried to get MK to share an Uber home despite living completely out of the way. She refused, insisting she was getting one. I left with a lawmaker to grab a beer elsewhere, both of us questioning whether we’d made the right call by not intervening more. She was an adult and it isn’t exactly like I could carry her out of the gathering. She did not, in fact, go home that night, which I could tell due to our shared locations on our phones.
Green later told me he simply drove her home the next morning because she was too drunk to function. Make of that what you will.
Source: Drudge Report
