Last night, the Daily Caller exposed a potential massive information security issue within approximately 80 Democratic Congressional offices, including Denver’s Democratic Rep. Diana DeGette. These Congressional offices employed a ring of IT “professionals” from a Pakistani family under investigation for criminal activity. In total, this family received more than $4 million in payments from July 2009 until now from the U.S. House of Representatives for their services as “shared employees” for the offices.
“The suspects had full access to the emails and office computer files of the members for whom they worked. A focus of the investigation by the U.S. Capitol Police is an off-site server on which congressional data was allegedly loaded without the knowledge of authorities.”
Well, this sounds vaguely familiar…. While the broad details may remind some of Hillary Clinton’s server issues, this is actually much worse. Clinton’s servers were located in her closet and her IT professional in Denver. The suspects are Imran, Abid, and Jamal Awan and their wives Hina Alvi and Natalia Sova. There is some question about whether these IT professionals worked from Pakistan, a known terrorist hot spot, and had connections to known terrorist organizations, like Hezbollah. From the Daily Caller:
“Yet the brothers spent significant time in Pakistan, TheDCNF was told. They even had time beginning in 2009 to operate a Northern Virginia car dealership, with Abid as its day-to-day manager. The dealership received a $100,000 loan that was never repaid from Dr. Ali Al-Attar, a onetime Iraqi politician who fled the U.S. on tax charges and who reportedly has links to the terrorist group Hezbollah.”
The media should ask DeGette immediately the following questions:
- Who originally suggested that DeGette use Imran Awan as her IT guy?
- How often was he seen in the office?
- Does she believe any of her information was stolen? If not, how can she be sure?
- Did she fire him immediately on February 2, 2017 when an investigation of wrongdoing was opened about Imran and his family? If not, why not?
- Is the U.S. House of Representatives investigating this potential security issue or just the Capitol Police? If so, why?
- Was she aware of Imran Awan’s link to Hezbollah during his employment?
- How did Imran Awan have time to run a car dealership while also working in her office?