The Democrat house of cards is continuing to collapse under the weight of its own corruption. A day after reports that the FBI raided the former home of an IT staffer with ties to high-ranking Democrats in Congress including Florida"s Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, that IT staffer — Imran Awan — was arrested at Dulles International Airport Tuesday while attempting to flee the country.
Awan — along with his brothers, Abid and Jamal, and two of their wives, Hina Alvi and Natalia Sova — are at ground zero of an ongoing investigation by U.S. Capitol Police and the FBI. That investigation came to a head when the FBI — serving a warrant — raided a residence previously occupied by the Awans and seized numerous hard drives which had been smashed in an apparent attempt to render the data found on them irretrievable.
There is evidence that the five fleeced taxpayers for millions of dollars by a variety of methods including overbilling, theft, and employee fraud.
The chiefs of staff for at least 30 sitting Democrats were made aware at least as early as February that the three Pakistani-born brothers and two of the brothers’ wives were under investigation for a litany of crimes and abuses of their access to sensitive data and that as a result of violating the House IT network rules, the five were removed from the list of IT staff with access to the House computer network. Though her office was made aware of all of this, former DNC chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz continued to employ Imran Awan in an advisory role.
Many of the Democrats who had employed the Awans were so invested in them that in March of 2016, eight House Democrats — all serving on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence — signed a letter requesting that the Awans be granted access to Top Secret Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI). Besides being on the payroll for members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the Awans were also employed by members of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.
In all, the brothers and their wives — while serving as “shared employees” — netted four to five million dollars between 2009 and 2016 (the last year for which numbers are available) while appearing on the payrolls of Democrat House members. That is a staggering figure in and of itself, but when one considers the “work” that was done to “earn” that money, it is even worse.
As the Daily Caller reported in March:
Since 2003, the family has collected $5 million overall, with Imran making $2 million and Abid making $1.5 million, according to Legistorm.com, which tracks congressional staff data. Of some 25,000 people who have worked in the House since 2010, only 100 have taken home more than Imran.
As “shared” employees, their salaries were cobbled together with part-time payments from multiple members, with a result that the Awans appeared at one time or another on an estimated 80 House Democrats’ payrolls.
And:
Imran first came to Capitol Hill in the early 2000s and Abid joined him in 2005. Imran’s wife Hina Alvi was added to the payroll in 2007, while Abid’s wife, Natalia Sova, appeared in 2011. Finally, in 2014 the youngest sibling, Jamal, joined the payroll in 2014 at the age of 20 with a salary of $160,000.
“In Imran’s wife’s offices, she didn’t show up or rarely showed up and Imran would handle it,” a former House staffer with direct knowledge of the brothers told TheDCNF. “Once in a while he would take her around to the offices but after a while he stopped even putting up the illusion and did all that stuff himself.”
The former staffer said “Jamal was always there,” but Imran would work only “odd hours.”
Sounds like a pretty neat set-up. Get on the payroll, show up rarely (if ever), and collect a higher salary than 99 percent of your coworkers. Corruption at its very best (or worst, depending on whether you are the criminal staffer or the victim taxpayer).
But, as they say on those late-night infomercials, “Wait. There’s more.” If it weren’t bad enough that the family was milking the system to the tune of as much as $5 million while “working” for House Democrats who seemed to either not notice or not care that most of them were employees-in-name-only, they are also suspected of a procurement scam in which they overcharged the House Administration Office for equipment they purchased and installed as well as walking away with computer equipment they removed from congressional offices and facilities. The value of that equipment — including computers and servers — is estimated at hundreds of thousands of dollars.
At the time that the Awans were cut off from the House network for both the procurement scam and violating the rules regarding access to data on that network, Politico reported that David Damron, communications director for the office of Wasserman-Schultz, replied to the question of Awan still working for the ousted DNC chair and current House member in an e-mail saying, “At this time we are continuing to gather information from House officials and will determine the best approach to move forward once we have reviewed that information.” Almost six months later, Awan was still listed as an employee. Only his arrest while attempting to flee the country changed that; Wasserman-Schultz fired him Tuesday.
That arrest comes about not only as the result of the crimes and improprieties listed above, but also because of a bank fraud case wherein Imran and his wife, Hina Alvi, applied for a home equity loan of $165,000 on a house in Alexandria, Virginia which they did not occupy. According to the arrest report, that money was pooled with other money and Awan sent $283,000 in a wire transfer to two people in his home country of Pakistan — where he was attempting to flee when he was arrested.
That Awan could even obtain the home equity loan is puzzling, considering the fact that after raking in millions of dollars in various schemes, he filed bankruptcy in 2012 (and was allowed to keep two houses). It appears that the rules governing everyone else have yet to apply to the Democrat IT man and his family.
The smashed hard drives seized in the raid on Awan’s former residence may contain evidence supporting allegations of data-theft from the House network. Awan’s close ties to at least one known terrorist bring the danger of his — and his family’s — access to that data into sharp focus.
Besides the suspicious wire transfer involved in his bank fraud case, Imran Awan has had financial dealings with Dr. Ali al-Attar, an Iraqi political figure who is wanted by U.S. authorities and has links to Hezbollah. As part of a limited liability corporation called Cars International A (CIA) — an auto dealership in Virginia (which he somehow managed to run while “working” full time for Wasserman-Schultz and others) — Imran Awan borrowed (and repaid) $100,000 from al-Attar.
That was not the only funny-money business going on at the dealership. The Daily Caller reported that Abid’s one-time business partner, Nasir Khattak, made some pretty damning claims in court records:
Despite numerous family members making $160,000 congressional salaries, debts went unpaid by the brothers, including to the Congressional Federal Credit Union.
“It was very bad record-keeping in Cars International.… It is close to impossible to make any sense out of all the transactions that happened,” Khattak said in court documents.
The $100,000 loan came as the dealership continued to rack up debt, court records show.
“Ali Al-Attar was out of the country as he was involved in politics and the formation of the Iraqi government,” Khattak said in court documents.
So, high-ranking Democrats — including then-DNC chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and several members of both the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Committee on Foreign Affairs — employed a Pakistani-born family with ties to a terrorist organization and then, either because they were complicit or because they didn’t recognize corruption when they saw it or because the Amran family had "dirt" on their employers, they allowed that family unhindered access to sensitive data. That family then stole the data, stole some of the equipment that held the data, bilked the American taxpayers for upwards of $5 million and more by being paid for work they never did and overcharging for equipment they installed, and committed one financial fraud after another.
Then, only when the family was officially under investigation and was barred from access to the House computer systems — essentially dismantling even the illusion that they were performing any work for the money they were receiving — did any of those Democrats part company with them. And — to top it off — Wasserman-Schultz did so only after her “IT guy” was arrested trying to flee the country to return to Pakistan where he had transfered $283,000 as part of one of those financial frauds.
It’s hard to imagine that there’s enough Clintonesque Teflon to go around to keep this from sticking all over the Democrat Party. If Democrats follow their usual playbook, it is time for them (with the help of their comrades in the liberal media) to ramp up the attention on allegations of corruption in the Trump administration.
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