Washington Congressional IT Scandal

Discussion in 'Political Discussions' started by heirophant, Jul 27, 2017.

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  1. heirophant

    heirophant Well-Known Member

    It's starting to sound like a Tom Clancy novel, and the MSM seems to be avoiding it like it's poison.

    It seems that a let's say interesting Pakistani-American guy named Imran Awan was Debbie Wasserman Schultz's IT man. He seems to have gotten at least three other members of his family managing IT for some 25 other Democratic members of Congress (including my own Democratic congresswoman). Together the family made at least $4 million for this work. They were also seemingly involved in buying and selling automobiles and flipping houses bought with loans obtained under allegedly questionable circumstances.

    When suspicions of bank fraud arose, this guy sent his wife and kids back to Pakistan where he spends months of each year himself. He put his homes up for sale. His primary residence was rented by a former Marine married to a serving US Navy officer. They discovered cabinets in the garage filled what appeared to be government IT gear, and that attempts had seemingly been made to destroy their hard-drives. They contacted the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and federal agents from a variety of agencies showed up and took the IT gear with them. Since then Awan has been contacting the couple repeatedly demanding that they hand over what he says is his IT stuff. He's even had a lawyer threaten them.

    Meanwhile Awan was wiring hundreds of thousands of dollars to Pakistan where his family was reassembling and a couple of days ago he was arrested at the airport by federal agents while trying to board a plane to Pakistan. So far, the charges seem to only be bank fraud.

    Details of that in an unsealed court affidavit here:

    https://www.scribd.com/document/354833989/United-States-of-America-v-Imran-Awan-affidavit#download&from_embed

    A counter-espionage investigation is apparently underway. This crew seems to have had access to the computers of a couple of dozen members of Congress, including three members of the House Intelligence Committee and five members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. (One wonders about what kind of security clearances this crew may or may not have had.) The family was supposedly denied access to government computers in February, but our guy was still employed as a highly-paid consultant to Debbie Wasserman Schultz until he was arrested at the airport trying to flee the country a few days ago.

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/frankminiter/2017/07/26/this-exploding-dnc-story-is-crazier-than-fiction-maybe-rep-wasserman-schultz-can-explain/#7819a46b4414

    Lots of information here:

    FBI Seized Hard Drives From Dem IT Aide | The Daily Caller

    House Committee Members Compromised By Rogue | The Daily Caller

    Congress' IT Guys Had History Of Suspicious D | The Daily Caller

    The Daily Caller's investigative unit seems to be the only news organization that's really investigating this.

    The New York Times and the Washington Post seemingly see nothing and hear nothing. (Of course they don't. It doesn't conform to what the NYT calls "the narrative", it's not damaging to the Trump administration, it doesn't involve Russians and they aren't getting it from anonymous leaks.)

    An interesting thing is that Debbie Wasserman Schultz had some of her files hacked prior to the Democratic convention illustrating how the DNC was favoring Hillary over Bernie, and the contents were posted on Wikileaks. (Leading to Debbie's sudden resignation from her position of Chairwoman of the DNC.) The DNC was also hacked prior to the Democratic convention. So... was this little Pakistani-connected gang the source of that information? They may have had direct system administrator access to the computers on which those files were stored. One also wonders about what connections they had, if any, to Pakistani intelligence.

    At the very least, it illustrates (along with Hillary's home-brew server) how cavalier a certain kind of government official is with government information. Security procedures are just for the little people, I guess.
     

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