It appears that the Daily Caller’s Luke Rosiak is the only reporter following the story of the Pakistani Awan family members who infiltrated the House Democrats’ IT staff working for Debbie Wasserman Schultz et al. When I say “following the story,” I mean reporting and breaking news in it, as Paul and I have noted many times on Power Line.
In January Rosiak drew on the House Office of Inspector General (OIG) report on the Awan. The OIG report concluded that the Awans made unauthorized access to congressional servers in 2016, allegedly accessing the data of members for whom they did not work, logging in as members of Congress themselves and covering their tracks.
In the latest installment of the story, Rosiak reported yesterday: “In March 2017, FBI agents were tailing House of Representatives IT aides suspected of hacking Congress, and apprehended one at the airport trying to make a hasty exit to Pakistan. She refused to speak with them, and a search revealed that she was carrying an apparently illegal amount of cash. The FBI allowed Hina Alvi, wife of Imran Awan, to board the plane anyway — then filed paperwork saying agents believed she had no intention of returning to the U.S.”
There is more, of course:
Though the findings place the case squarely into the category of political cyber-crimes that have otherwise been high-profile priorities, the lead FBI agent assigned to the Awan case was a first-year agent, and not from one of the FBI’s big-guns divisions. The charges brought by prosecutors are so minor that Awan’s own lawyer speculated they could be a “placeholder” for future charges.
Server logs of government computers backed up the OIG’s findings. Yet six months after the initial charges, no additional counts have been brought, raising the question of whether the DOJ is seriously investigating the potential national security breach.
And it goes downhill from there. Rosiak concludes that the next court date is March 8, but it appears to be limited to Imran Awan and charges that have nothing to do with shady work for House Democrats.
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