Some of those defending the Awans, to include Wasserman-Schultz and the family lawyer, have insisted that he and his family were the victims of “ an anti-Muslim, right-wing smear job, ” though there is no actual evidence to suggest that is the case. Most stopped employing the Awan family, but Wasserman-Schultz kept Imran on the payroll until the day after he was actually arrested. The Capitol Hill Police began an investigation and quietly alerted the congressmen involved that there might be a problem. It was also believed that they had somehow obtained access to House of Representatives’ computer databases as well as to other information in the internal computer system that they were not normally authorized to work on as part of their duties. The business was named Cars International A, abbreviated on its business cards as CIA.Īs of February 2016, the Awans came under suspicion for having set up an operation to steal and resell government-owned computer equipment. In spite of all that income, Imran Awan declared bankruptcy in 2010, claiming losses of $1 million on a car business that he owned in Falls Church, Va. The considerable level of overbilling has not been explained by the congressmen involved. The Awans billed Congress for more than $4 million between 20, a sum that has been reported to be three or four times higher than the norm for government contractor IT specialists performing similar work. It is not known if the Awans, who were working for several committee members, would have been involved, but Buzzfeed, in its initial reporting on the investigation of the Awans family, repeated the concerns of a congressman that the suspects might have “had access to the House of Representatives’ entire computer network.” Sometimes Congress pushes the process by demanding that its staff have access above and beyond the normal “need to know.” In March 2016, for example, eight Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee requested that their staffs be given access to top-secret sensitive compartmented information (SCI).
The office seeking the clearance for a staff member must put in a request, some kind of investigation follows, and the applicant must sign a non-disclosure agreement before the authorization is granted. The process of granting security clearances to Congressional staff is not exactly transparent, but it is not unlike clearances for other government agencies. Patrick Murphy, who was at the time a member of the House Intelligence Committee, as well as for Rep. Abbas wound up working in the office of Rep. At one point, they brought into the House as a colleague one Rao Abbas, someone to whom they owed money and who might have had no qualifications at all to work IT. They did not have security clearances and it is not even certain that they were in any way checked out before being hired. Thirty-seven-year-old Awan, as well as his wife and two brothers Abid and Jamal, worked as IT administrators for nearly 30 congressmen, all Democrats, including former Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. To be sure, the tale is a strange one with plenty of unsavory links.
A number of conservative websites, including Breitbart, have been sounding the alarm over a possible cover-up that just might even be linked to what we are now calling Russiagate. Yet the speed at which the news vanished has prompted some observers to suggest that there might actually be something more to the disappearance than the operation of the normal media-reporting cycle. The reports predictably produced some press coverage before the story died. On July 25, Pakistani-American IT specialist Imran Awan was arrested at Dulles Airport for bank fraud while he was allegedly fleeing to Pakistan.