WhatFinger


Uh-oh!

Debbie Wasserman Schultz IT staffer arrested while trying to flee the country



It's like something out of a movie. The conspiratorial IT guy, a staffer for a crooked - and disgraced - former DNC chair, has put his escape plan into motion. His affairs are in order, money has been wired overseas, his wife has already escaped to a third-world hellhole. Now, all he has to do is get through the airport. Once he's on the plane and the seatbelt light goes "ding," he's home free. Then the feds show up and haul him away.
Of course, I'm talking about former DNC chairwoman and 2016 mastermind, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and her now-incarcerated IT staffer. The scene played out Monday at Dulles International Airport, where Imran Awan, Wasserman Schultz's Pakistani-born tech wizard, was arrested while trying to flee the country. He's been charged with bank fraud, but you can bet that's the least of his - and Debbie's - worries. From the Daily Caller News Foundation...
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.

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This comes just days after we learned, also from the Daily Caller, that the FBI had seized a bunch of smashed hard drives from Imran Anwar's home.
FBI agents seized smashed computer hard drives from the home of Florida Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s information technology (IT) administrator, according to two sources with knowledge of the investigation. Pakistani-born Imran Awan, long-time right-hand IT aide to the former Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairwoman, has since desperately tried to get the hard drives back, an individual whom FBI investigators interviewed in the case told The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group.
....AND it comes just a few months after Debbie Wasserman Schultz flipped out and threatened a Capitol Police officer over the evidentiary confiscation of her personal laptop. DWS: I don’t understand how that is possible. Members’ equipment is members’ equipment. My understanding is the the Capitol Police is not able to confiscate members’ equipment when the member is not under investigation. It is their equipment and it is supposed to be returned. Chief Verderosa: I think there are extenuating circumstances in this case, and working through my counsel and the necessary personnel, if that in fact is the case, and with the permission of through the investigation, then we’ll return the equipment. But until that happens we can’t return the equipment. DWS: I think you’re violating the rules when you conduct your business that way and you should expect that there will be consequences.

As Breitbart wrote at the time, that computer was connected with an investigation into potential leaks, the transmission of sensitive material to an undisclosed 'offisite location,' and the fact that Awan's family had been paid millions for no-show jobs...
"the investigation — which Awan, his wife Hina Alvi, and three other Democrat House staffers are part of — “is examining members’ data leaving the network and how Awan managed to get Members to place three relatives and a friend into largely no-show positions on their payrolls, billing $4 million since 2010.”
If you watch that clip, Debbie really hammers home the point that her "understanding is the Capitol Police is not able to confiscate members’ equipment when the member is not under investigation." Yet they didn't give it back. This, obviously, leads everyone to wonder; Is Wasserman Schultz's laptop part of this investigation, and is she - along with Awan - a target of that inquiry? The bottom line on all of this is: "we just don't know right now."


It seems clear that this is far, far, more than a simple bank fraud case. Awan had complete access to the communications of dozens of top-level House Democrats. Over the last few years, he and his cohorts worked for "80 members of Congress, all Democrats, including members of the homeland security, foreign affairs and intelligence committees," and worked for many of them simultaneously. They had access to virtually all their internal messaging, as well as Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s official DNC iPad. ...And this access existed throughout the Wikileaks scandal. Wasserman Schultz's spokesman has declined to comment on whether the stolen emails - which allegedly represent "Russian hacking" - came from her account. The biggest question seems to be why it took so long for someone to do ...literally anything about the Awan situation.
“I don’t know what they have, but they have something on someone. It’s been months at this point” with no arrests, said Pat Sowers, who has managed IT for several House offices for 12 years. “Something is rotten in Denmark.” A manager at a tech-services company that works with Democratic House offices said he approached congressional offices, offering their services at one-fourth the price of Awan and his Pakistani brothers, but the members declined. At the time, he couldn’t understand why his offers were rejected but now he suspects the Awans exerted some type of leverage over members. “There’s no question about it: If I was accused of a tenth of what these guys are accused of, they’d take me out in handcuffs that same day, and I’d never work again,” he said.

Obviously, this is still breaking, and we'll keep following it. But ask yourselves these questions: A: Why did it take so long for anything to be done about Awan? Why was his family receiving so much money for what appears to be barely-existent jobs? B: "Why isn't it bigger mainstream news?" Can you imagine the hysterical feeding frenzy that we'd witness if this same series of events had unfolded on the GOP side of the aisle? C: What are the consequences if - and I stress if - we learn that it wasn't "Russian Hackers" leaking internal DNC communications, it was the DNC Chairwoman's IT guy?

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