Reporter: Why Didn't the Right Get the Swalwell Story?

She deserved credit for getting the Fang Fang story but eventually claimed the rest of it wasn't her beat.

What is the sexual abuse angle to the Fang Fang story? I am unaware of one.

— Bethany 貝書穎 (@BethanyAllenEbr) April 13, 2026

Miller said "sexual abuse" when I think he meant "sexual misconduct" but eventually they get past that.

You said right there is "sexual abuse angle" to the Fang Fang story so I'm asking what you meant by that, as I am unaware of that. pic.twitter.com/E9Di86UKXG

— Bethany 貝書穎 (@BethanyAllenEbr) April 13, 2026

Here's where she says the rest of the Swalwell stuff wasn't her beat.

I did not play it down. I very much wanted to report it out myself. But MeToo stories on the Hill aren't related to my beat, as much as I personally wish I could report them out. I passed the tip along to colleagues on the Hill beat.

— Bethany 貝書穎 (@BethanyAllenEbr) April 13, 2026

I'm kind of in genuine awe right now. You're probably good to stop posting, incredible.

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) April 13, 2026

So, look, just because she heard the rumors doesn't automatically mean she gets to write the story. I can see that. But the question is what happened to the tip? Surely it was someone's beat? She can't explain that, as you'll see in a moment.

Today, Bethany Allen says we should really be blaming right-leaning media outlets. Why didn't they get the story?

Fox News has one of the biggest and best-funded newsrooms in the US. Why didn't Fox News publish an investigation into Swalwell's sexual misconduct?

Why didn't Breitbart? Newsmax? The Daily Caller?

And why is no one in the right-wing media ecosystem asking these questions? pic.twitter.com/0tyVRLwZMt

— Bethany 貝書穎 (@BethanyAllenEbr) April 16, 2026

She thinks we should be thanking the left-wing outlets that did eventually did get the story, not asking why they didn't get it sooner.

Because the fact is that ONLY so-called "mainstream media" — no right-wing outlets — put forward the massive resources required to publish these investigations into Swalwell.

— Bethany 貝書穎 (@BethanyAllenEbr) April 16, 2026

Not everyone is buying this new approach. Again, what happened to the tip?

You said that there were rumors about Swalwell for years but you did not report on it because it was not your beat.

You then said you passed it on to the Axios Hill reporting team. What happened?

They then did not report on it. https://t.co/K1oz4jrgrB

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) April 16, 2026

You have a former Axios reporter ADMITTING she heard rumors of Swalwell. She decided not to report them, but instead forward them on to "collegues" in the year 2020.

There were zero AXIOS stories about Swalwell's behavior in 2020.

Media corruption from @mikeallen and… pic.twitter.com/1m5lKHdJQg

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) April 16, 2026

As for the attacks on right-wing sites, how do we know that Breitbart or any of the others had heard about this the way that Bethany Allen had? Everyone involved here appears to be left-wing, from Swalwell to his staff to Cheyenne Hunt who teased the story online and was friends with one of the victims, to the outlets who were handed the story. So far as we know, no one involved reached out to Breitbart.

Swalwell’s staffers were liberal Democrats. They are not inclined to speak to the outlets you named. CNN and MSNBC were best positioned to get these sources, but Swalwell also basically lived on those channels for years https://t.co/dZpwE0t7iV

— Chuck Ross (@ChuckRossDC) April 16, 2026

Even if Bethany is right that some right-wing outlets knew, that still doesn't explain why mainstream outlets let the rumors circulate for years.

It’s not that I think a journo somewhere had the story nailed down and declined to publish. But I think there was a disinclination to look deeper into the rumors they’d all heard about.

— Chuck Ross (@ChuckRossDC) April 16, 2026

A ton of staffers and journos have come out this week and said this was all an “open secret.” All I’m saying is that the news outlets best positioned to get this story were the ones on the same ideological side as Swalwell, and they somehow didn’t get the story.

— Chuck Ross (@ChuckRossDC) April 16, 2026

Let's be honest, if the women in question had gone to Breitbart, Swalwell would have capitalized on that and used it to discredit the story as a right-wing partisan attack. So, apart from everyone involved being on the left, the women in question had a specific reason to avoid talking to right-wing outlets. And it seems that's what happened.

But getting back to Axios and why they never covered it:

Axios at the time had never published any investigation of any kind. It's not set up as an investigative outlet. My investigation, of Swalwell and his relationship with the Chinese spy, was the first investigation Axios ever published, and we did it on my sheer force of will, for…

— Bethany 貝書穎 (@BethanyAllenEbr) April 16, 2026

My investigation, of Swalwell and his relationship with the Chinese spy, was the first investigation Axios ever published, and we did it on my sheer force of will, for this one Swalwell story, and in partnership with another investigative journalist at an outside think tank -- basically, a one-off kind of situation. A couple of Axios journalists since then have published a few, such as one by a local DC reporter about DC govt officials use of WhatsApp instead of formal email, but overall investigative journalism not something that Axios is set up or resourced or even intended to do.

A subsequent investigation I published with Axios in 2023, about a Chinese Communist Party training school in Tanzania, I had to get my own outside funding and I spent a couple years planning and pitching it. Axios doesn't hire investigative reporters, doesn't have any investigative editors, and doesn't have the work flow of institutional emphasis for it. I'm just like, an extremely stubborn China reporter who managed to get a few investigations published there.

If you are reading this with the kind of open-minded desire to learn new information, what you will see is that Axios supported me in going out of my way to report out an investigation of Swalwell, on my own beat. This is the opposite of what you are claiming, that there was some sort of media cover-up to protect Swalwell.

Okay, so let's assume for the sake of argument that Bethany did her best. What about her colleagues? Why did they drop the ball she handed to them?

These are your exact words and you're directing a lot of anger at right wing outlets and not Axios which you claim you sent them the story and the tips.

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) April 16, 2026

To her credit, she seems to offer an honest answer: "I don't know."

I don't know the answer to your question, but my guess is that no one on the politics team felt equipped to chase a tip that, under the best of circumstances, would obviously require the resources of an entire investigative team to pursue. Axios didn't have a team like that; not…

— Bethany 貝書穎 (@BethanyAllenEbr) April 16, 2026

I don't know the answer to your question, but my guess is that no one on the politics team felt equipped to chase a tip that, under the best of circumstances, would obviously require the resources of an entire investigative team to pursue. Axios didn't have a team like that; not even close.

Here's what I do know: Axios management was very supportive of my own investigation into Swalwell. You are implying (or claiming directly) that someone at Axios wanted to avoid a story that would make Swalwell look bad. But we have very clear counter-evidence against that: In reality, top Axios leadership at that very same time was very supportive of an investigation of Swalwell, and of California Democrats at large. So your implications don't make sense.

I'm sorry but this is where I think she's pushing too far. Maybe they supported her investigation but the facts are that they seem not to have done anything with the other rumors and neither did anyone else. No one on the left, where we know this was circulating, got the story.

And yes, it's true that no one on the right got the story either, but I think there are reasonable explanations for that. I'm willing to concede that the right should have gone after the story if they knew about it, but I do think it was unlikely the women in question would ever go to Breitbart or Daily Wire to confirm it. They would know this would only make it easier for Swalwell to lie. In the end, these women were always going to go to left-leaning outlets where they felt comfortable. That is what happened. I don't think the right can fairly be blamed for not catching this one.

Update: Yup.

Because Democratic victims would rather saw off their arms and legs than talk to Fox News. You NEED their participation to run a story like this. It is definitionally *impossible* to get it if you're at a right-coded outfit.

But you *know* this. Why are you asking it… https://t.co/fb0mN0sUJ3

— Jeff Blehar is *BOX OFFICE POISON* (@EsotericCD) April 16, 2026