House Dem IT Scandal Shoes Finally Start Dropping

If you’ve been reading the Friday LinkSwarms, one persistent story there is the House Democrats IT scandal. If you haven’t been paying attention, three Pakistani brothers (Abid, Imran, and Jamal Awan) who managed office IT for Democratic members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and other lawmakers, associate Rao Abbas, and two of their wives, Hina Alvi and Natalia Sova, were accused of improperly accessing data, stealing computers, not showing up for their jobs, and various other crimes.

Yesterday the shoes finally started dropping:

Florida Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s top information technology (IT) aide was arrested Monday attempting to board a flight to Pakistan after wiring $283,000 from the Congressional Federal Credit Union to that country.

He attempted to leave the country hours after The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group revealed that he is the target of an FBI investigation, and the FBI apprehended him at the airport.

Credit union officials permitted the wire to go through, and his wife has already fled the country to Pakistan, after police confronted her at the airport and found $12,000 in cash hidden in her suitcase but did not stop her from boarding, court documents show.

“On January 18, 2017 at 12:09 pm, an international wire transfer request form was submitted [at the Congressional Federal Credit Union] at the Longworth House Office Building in the District of Columbia, in the amount of $283,000.00, to two individuals in Faisalabad, Pakistan,” according to an affidavit obtained by TheDCNF.

Imran Awan, a Pakistani-born IT aide, had access to all emails and files of dozens of members of Congress, as well as the password to the iPad that Wasserman Schultz used for Democratic National Committee business before she resigned as its head in July 2016.

How technologically illiterate do you need to be to give your IT aide your iPad password? If she was really stuck, there’s an Apple store in Georgetown.

TheDCNF reported Sunday night that the FBI had joined the investigation and seized smashed hard drives from Imran’s home. The next day, the FBI apprehended him at Dulles Airport after noticing that he had purchased a ticket to Pakistan, via Qatar.

The affidavit says he was charged with bank fraud involving fraudulently taking out mortgages, which was one of several financial schemes TheDCNF has detailed. It appears to be a placeholder for future charges, spurred because of the attempt to leave the country, and does not mention his work for Congress, which is the investigation’s primary focus.

As TheDCNF has reported, the Awans own numerous rental properties that often have multiple mortgages taken out on them, and they have told renters they want payments in untraceable ways. The charging documents say Imran’s wife Hina Alvi, who also made $165,000 working for House Democrats, took out a second mortgage against a house from the Congressional Federal Credit Union by falsely claiming it was her “principal residence” and that she will “occupy” the property, and also fraudulently reported no rental income on her taxes.

In the very best case scenario, the Awan are merely scam artists taking advantage of House Democrats’ stupidity. In the worst case, they were actively working with either terrorist organizations or foreign interests like the Pakistani ISI, and harvest a treasure-trove of intelligence and blackmail information.

Two additional possibilities:

  • With his access to her special DNC iPad, did Imran Awan find additional proof of Wasserman Schultz’s rigging of the 2016 Democratic primaries for Hillary Clinton and against Bernie Sanders?
  • Did the Awan ring capture additional illegally classified information from Hillary Clinton’s homebrew email server? There’s been no evidence of that thus far, but it’s certainly not beyond the realm of possibility.

    • Hats off to the Daily Caller’s Luke Rosiak for being on top of the Anwan ring scandal for months. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

    By the way, looking for an image of Imran Awan, this is the first thing that comes up in Google Image Search:

    Additional House Democrat IT scandal news:

  • After months of mounting evidence and allegations, Wasserman Schultz finally fired Imran Awan. That’s like John Profumo continuing to bone Christine Keeler six months after he found out she was also boning a Soviet diplomat.
  • “House Ethics Committee ranking member Ted Deutch fled from The Daily Caller and his office refused to respond to emailed questions about his knowledge of former House IT employee Imran Awan, who is now charged with multiple counts of bank fraud and previously worked for the Florida lawmaker and other Democrats.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • I might have missed this Awan ring tidbit from back in February:

    Rogue congressional staffers took $100,000 from an Iraqi politician while they had administrator-level access to the House of Representatives’ computer network, according to court documents examined by The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group.

    The money was a loan from Dr. Ali al-Attar, an Iraqi political figure, and was funneled through a company with “impossible”-to-decipher financial transactions that the congressional information technology (IT) staffers controlled.

    (Hat tip: Red State via Instapundit.)

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    This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 26th, 2017 at 11:51 AM and is filed under Crime, Democrats. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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