🍻 In This Week’s Hill Spill: The House Came Back and So Did the Drama — a Caucus Knife Fight, Poetry in the Well and Passcodes Over the Atlantic

🍹 Welcome to this week’s Hill Spill! It’s Thursday, so we have tea. We always have tea.

The House came back just long enough to remind everyone why it leaves. Jared Golden and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez voted with Mike Johnson. Their caucus wants a scalp. Leadership could do without the drama.

Chuck Edwards was censured, and if this week produced one sentence for the books, it is “poetry is not sexual misconduct.” Frame it. Burn it. Either works, depending on your prerogative. Eric Swalwell got the stranger story. The FBI asked air marshals to watch him on a Frankfurt flight and try to catch a passcode. A week later, agents took his devices.

There is much to get into, so pour yourself something fun and let’s get to it. 🍸

The House came back for a week and so did the drama! Rank-and-file Democrats want disciplinary action on Reps. Jared Golden (D-Maine) and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Wash.). Senior Democrats are telling us it isn’t going to happen.

We anticipated the rule fight on the Republican side. Hardliners have spent this Congress taking those votes hostage. Instead, it was those two Democrats.

They voted yes on a GOP rule Tuesday. It passed 210-208. Five Republicans voted no. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) kept his floor schedule, including a resolution condemning “socialism in all its forms.” Minority members almost never cross on the rule. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), Whip Katherine Clark (D-Mass.) and Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.) said they were blindsided, called it a “significant breach of trust” and sent it to the Committee on Caucus Rules.

Johnson did not mention the two Democrats after the vote. “The rule has passed,” he told reporters. “Many of you thought that would not happen today, but we passed a rule to continue business this week. Republicans are here to work.” Asked Wednesday whether it happens without them, he said: “I would have twisted arms as I always do.”

Democrats we talked to this week were split on punishment, not on how angry they are.

“Yes, I think something should happen and I also think something will happen,” one Democratic lawmaker told us. “Less clear on what that might be or when it might happen.” They are not talking about stripping gavels. They are talking about a cold shoulder later, when one of them needs votes or a committee seat. “Feels like the longer you wait the harder they both are to do,” the lawmaker said.

A senior Democratic source told us nothing happens to Golden or Gluesenkamp Perez over the rule vote. “Jared rides off into the hills of Maine and MGP goes ahead and wins her race to ensure we are in the majority,” the source said. “Yesterday’s price is not today’s price.”

And sources have been telling us they doubt Jeffries will follow through, noting the vote may help MGP win her race. Golden is done after this term.

Golden said in a statement he voted for the rule “for one simple reason”: it set up a vote on his bill to protect Maine lobstermen. “My constituents don’t care about the team sports of Congressional procedure,” he told CNN.

“What the DC bubble doesn’t get is that working waterfronts require working people,” Gluesenkamp Perez said in a statement. “Nature is not a terrarium — and you don’t get effective environmentalism without the input of people who make their livelihoods and heritage on the water.”

Later Tuesday on X, about the socialism resolution and the rest of the slate: “Standing around pointing fingers, debating -isms and making people photocopy their birth certificate every time they cast a ballot is not the job,” she said.

Another Democrat, on background, told us: “I am pissed at their vote. Most of my Dem colleagues are. Now should they lose their committee seats over it? No, that’s going too far. But is there something else, short of that, to enforce discipline? That’s the important question. Because this could be a recurring issue next term, especially with some of these DSA members coming in.”

The photo that traveled was not even from the vote. On Wednesday at Rules, Gluesenkamp Perez testified on a proposed rewrite of the House sexual harassment policy if Democrats take the majority. Ranking member Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) turned his back on her. Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) quote-tweeted the picture: “This photo is embarrassing… for Jim.” Jeffries later said McGovern had since spoken with her.

Jeffries told reporters he had a “productive, forward-looking conversation” with Gluesenkamp Perez and called her “an important member of the House Democratic Caucus.”

Republicans have been watching the intra-Dem fight with popcorn.

“Apparently it’s only a ‘big tent party’ if you’re an antisemite or a socialist or both,” one GOP operative told us. “This shame and blame game is why national Democrats are losing members like Jared Golden in the first place — who present their only chance to hold onto districts like his.”

If the House flips, Democrats will be the ones trying to keep people in line on the rule. Stay tuned!

The Atlantic’s Shane Harris scooped a strange FBI ask: put air marshals on Eric Swalwell’s Aug. 8 United flight from Frankfurt to Washington and see if they could read his passcodes while he used his phone and laptop.

The paperwork called it “Special Mission Coverage.” Harris notes the job description for those officers is hiding in plain sight on flights that might be hijacked, not watching a former House member unlock an iPhone.

A week later the bureau was at SFO with a warrant. California Post video shows Swalwell in a hat, black hoodie and sneakers. He looked calm, the agents walked him off the concourse and take a white iPhone, a charger and a MacBook Pro. They also searched his D.C. house the next day, sources familiar with the investigation confirmed to us.

Court papers tie the warrant to 18 U.S.C. § 242, the civil-rights law used against officers who violate rights “under color of law.” Experts who spoke to Harris floated a theory that investigators think he used his seat in Congress to pressure accusers to stay quiet. They also said it’s not obvious the statute reaches a former legislator the way it reaches a cop with cuffs. No charges have been filed.

People Harris interviewed called the air-marshal request unusual on two fronts. Sex-assault cases are usually state work, and if the FBI wanted someone watched, the standard move is to put FBI agents on the aircraft.

A former federal prosecutor, speaking to the New York Post, said looking with the naked eye in an open cabin may not count as a Fourth Amendment search, and guessed the timing (a week before the phones were seized) had to do with how hard Apple devices are to open.

Kash Patel, who now runs the FBI, had already put Swalwell on paper as a “corrupt actor of the first order.” As we scooped last month, Swalwell’s team cited his past relationship with Katie Miller, now married to Stephen Miller, in conversations with DOJ and argued that releasing the Fang Fang file would look like weaponization.

The investigation itself is not about that fight. A former staffer accused Swalwell of raping her when she was too intoxicated to consent. Lonna Drewes says he drugged and raped her and other women say he sent unsolicited photos of his genitals. He has repeatedly denied criminal conduct and has said he made “mistakes in judgment.” The Manhattan DA and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department have open probes.

Sara Azari, Swalwell’s attorney, told Harris the government never asked for the devices. “Had the DOJ asked, we would have complied.”

She called the marshal request an “extraordinary escalation.” In the New York Post she added that the warrants were executed in public, the inventory leaked, reporters got a heads-up days early, and she wants the source of those disclosures investigated.

Amanda Koski, who has publicly spoken about Swalwell’s conduct toward her, told us: “It’s strange her client — a former U.S. Congressman, who sat on the impeachment committee — chose to leave the country while under investigation by multiple law enforcement agencies — and yet (no matter the color of the hoodie, or the country he’s in) she appears shocked to find out her client is being monitored. One might suspect that her client seems to think he is somehow exempt from the basic investigative functions of government. Yikes!”

The FBI and Azari did not immediately return a request for comment.

While we are on the topic of Eric Swalwell: when we first saw the footage of agents taking his electronics at SFO, we were perplexed. Not by the warrant, by the fit. The hat, the black hoodie, what appears to be a Zach Bryan T-shirt, the sneakers — all not great.

At first we thought it was giving emo kid, circa 2010. On second glance we realized it was not giving teenager at a Fall Out Boy concert. It is giving Ted Kaczynski.

Investigators are looking into the allegations. We are not getting ahead of that, and we are not calling anyone guilty of anything. He is, however, guilty of a questionable outfit.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy once said he wants people dressed for the “golden age of travel,” not slippers and pajamas. We are not asking for a blazer at the gate. We are asking everyone not to wear that. But we are going to let people decide in the poll below.

Tara Palmeri is on the show this week. She’s a friend of ours, and one of the best, most fearless reporters going. You can find her work on The Tara Palmeri Show and in The Red Letter.

We get into Nancy Mace, who has been a fierce advocate for survivors and still describes the president as “a good man” and “a father figure,” even after saying he “dispensed of” her. Tara talks about how complicated that relationship is, and why she thinks Mace and Michael Cohen both keep getting pulled back in.

On Cohen, she has some lit insight following her recent interview with him. She says he had quietly gotten back on better terms with Trump, with a pardon in the picture, and then returned to TV still sounding like a critic. Tara’s take: “The only thing I believe about Michael Cohen is that he’s an opportunist.”

Also in the episode: why she thinks the Epstein files came out the way they did, an afternoon she spent reporting with Virginia Giuffre, her midterm gut-check, and the North Korea trip that ended so fast she’s pretty sure a state TV anchor still has her jacket.

You can send every member of Congress a 22-page letter that includes the sentence “poetry is not sexual misconduct” and they will still censure you. Tuesday’s vote was 413-2. Chuck Edwards and Ralph Norman were the only nos.

Edwards still had to sit in the well while Mike Johnson read it out. He’d spent recess working the letter. After the vote, a Republican told us it was “f***** nuts.”

House Ethics Chairman Michael Guest (R-Miss.) walked the floor through the committee’s version. The two staffers said they were uncomfortable. Senior aides told Edwards. He didn’t like that, and he didn’t stop. Guest said he was either blind to what it did to them or didn’t care.

Then the list: jewelry over $1,000, designer purses, guns, shoes, flowers, a laptop, a phone, a KitchenAid, a robot vacuum, trips, tickets, dinners for two. One of the women felt she had to keep wearing a necklace he bought her. When she didn’t, he said he was disappointed.

At the goodbye party in the office he read her a poem, got choked up, and ran a slideshow of the two of them. People in the room later told investigators it was a lot.

His pitch never really changed. No sex. No explicit ask. No rule against being “friends” with staff. One of them called him her “second dad,” he told colleagues. Investigators also heard she’d told a friend she was “scared lowkey” and didn’t buy the daughter thing.

On the floor he apologized to the two women and his wife, said the judgment was bad, and still said the committee got it wrong.

He’s already out of the race. He’s gone in January, a censure doesn’t end the term — it just does it in front of the room.

The House showed up for a few days, leaves town next week, comes back the 14th, and then cancelled the rest of September like a group chat that died mid-planning. So we’re making an Aviation. It’s the color of a bruise and the energy of a member who already booked the 5:40 out of Reagan.

Invented in 1916, which is also how long some of these continuing resolutions feel. Gin, lemon, a little cherry liqueur, a little crème de violette. Shake it cold, pour it in a coupe, add a cherry if you want to feel like you have a social life. Go easy on the violette… too much and you’re drinking perfume in a Hill basement.

Ice. Shake. Strain. Do not “improve” it. This is not the Senate.

Have one tonight. Have none next week — they’re gone, you can be too. Make it again the week of the 14th, which is now the entire remaining September session. After that, wheels up until the midterms, unless leadership texts a 48-hour heads-up because the Senate finally moved. If that happens, skip the coupe. Use a pint glass and lie down.