Federal Election Commission records show that Rep. Eric Swalwell and Sen. Ruben Gallego both routed campaign dollars to luxury Puerto Rico hotels on the same June 2021 weekend Gallego married his second wife, raising fresh questions about whether the spending served any legitimate political purpose, as the New York Post reported.
Swalwell's campaign operation recorded two payments totaling $1,522.11 at the Hyatt Regency Grand Reserve Puerto Rico on June 7, 2021. That same day, Gallego's political operation spent $2,000 at the nearby Fairmont El San Juan. An Instagram post from a wedding guest tagged the Hyatt Regency Grand Reserve as the location of Gallego's wedding ceremony on that date.
Federal law prohibits the use of campaign funds for personal expenses. Neither congressman has offered a public accounting that squares these charges with any campaign activity.
Rep. Linda Sanchez also appears in the FEC trail. Her campaign spending records show $1,809.79 charged to the Hyatt Regency and an additional $540.93 labeled as a "lodging deposit" made on May 18, 2021, roughly three weeks before the wedding weekend. Sanchez was reported to have attended the celebration.
Taken together, the three Democratic members of Congress directed more than $5,800 in campaign money to Puerto Rico resorts over a single weekend that, by every available indicator, revolved around a personal social event.
Swalwell's pattern of lavish campaign spending is not new. A 2021 Breitbart review of FEC filings found his campaign had spent more than $10,000 on twenty-six limousine and luxury car rides during a single quarter, roughly $26,000 on luxury hotels, including over $20,000 at the Ritz Carlton Half Moon Bay, where his wife was listed as director of sales, and thousands more on alcohol and high-end dining. Fox News noted at the time that charges at a Capitol Hill liquor store and through the delivery app Drizly were not clearly campaign-related.
Gallego's team moved to counter the story late on Tuesday by releasing an invoice. That document showed a $2,000 charge described as "transferred at check-in" from a September donor retreat. The implication was that the June charge was merely an administrative carryover, not a fresh wedding-weekend expense.
But a contract the team also put out showed $0 paid on every deposit installment, including one dated June 15. If no deposits were paid, the explanation that the $2,000 simply migrated from a prior event becomes harder to follow, not easier.
Gallego and Sydney Barron Gallego were legally married in Washington, D.C., at the National Gallery of Art in December 2019. They went public with their engagement in February 2020, ahead of the June 2021 ceremony in Puerto Rico. Sydney Barron Gallego serves as Director of Government Advocacy at the National Association of Realtors, where she focuses on housing and legislative strategy targeting House Democrats. She previously worked on Hillary Clinton's campaign and with the Senate Democrats' campaign arm.
Swalwell's mounting legal troubles have already reshaped his career. He recently announced he would resign from Congress after suspending his California governor campaign. He apologized to his family and staff while denying the accusations that precipitated his departure.
During a press conference on Tuesday, Gallego went out of his way to separate himself from the disgraced Swalwell. He said he had no knowledge of any inappropriate behavior, though he acknowledged he had heard Swalwell was "flirty." He added that he had reached out to Swalwell's wife through a mutual acquaintance.
Then he escalated. Gallego told reporters that Swalwell "became very good at being a predator" and "lied to all of us" during his tenure on the House Judiciary Committee, which was active in efforts tied to Donald Trump's impeachment.
Gallego delivered the sharpest line of the day with visible anger, as reported by the New York Post:
"And it hurts, the fact that he hurt a lot of people, and it p***** me off that now we all have to deal with all of his BS, his family, the poor victims that are still going to have to seek justice."
That is strong language from a man whose own FEC records place campaign dollars at a resort hotel on his wedding weekend. The moral high ground is harder to claim when your political operation is cutting checks at the same party.
The broader fallout from Swalwell's resignation has already prompted federal prosecutors to move toward interviewing his accusers, a step that could crack open secret congressional settlement agreements that have shielded members from public scrutiny for years.
Gallego's eagerness to condemn Swalwell is worth measuring against his own history of keeping uncomfortable facts away from voters. Court records show Gallego informed his first wife, Kate Gallego, on December 15, 2016, that their marriage was over. He moved to seal the divorce filings that same day, citing their status as "high-profile public officials" and the likelihood of media scrutiny.
Kate Gallego said in those filings that she was unaware of his intention to end the marriage, describing herself as "without knowledge" of his claim that it was "irretrievably broken." She was pregnant at the time. The divorce was finalized in April 2017. Kate Gallego later served on the Phoenix City Council before being elected Mayor of Phoenix in March 2019.
Gallego fought efforts by the Washington Free Beacon to unseal those divorce records. A man who seals court filings to avoid scrutiny and then lectures the press about another politician's dishonesty is, at minimum, asking voters to extend him a courtesy he has not earned.
Meanwhile, neither Gallego nor Swalwell has publicly posted photos together from the wedding, a detail the Daily Mail flagged in its own reporting on the FEC records. Gallego's team pushed back against the Daily Mail article before releasing the invoice and contract that, as noted above, raised as many questions as they answered.
Swalwell's closest congressional allies have already distanced themselves from him. Gallego appears to be doing the same, while hoping no one notices that his own FEC filings put him in the same tropical zip code, spending donor money at the same time, for what looks an awful lot like a personal celebration.
Gallego won his Arizona Senate race in November 2024. He now sits in the upper chamber. The campaign spending questions from June 2021 did not surface with enough force to affect that outcome. Whether they matter now depends on whether anyone with subpoena power or enforcement authority decides to look.
The FEC has a well-documented history of slow-walking enforcement, particularly against sitting members of Congress. That institutional passivity is precisely how spending like this survives in the open, filed, recorded, and ignored.
Governor Gavin Newsom has already scheduled a special election to fill the seat Swalwell vacated. The political machinery moves on. But the FEC records remain, and they tell a simple story: three Democratic members of Congress spent campaign funds at luxury Puerto Rico resorts on a wedding weekend, and not one of them has offered an explanation that holds up to basic scrutiny.
Donors give money to elect candidates, not to fund beach-resort weddings. If that distinction still means anything, someone ought to enforce it.
