Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Awan Family, Donna Brazile, Seth Rich, and the DNC Email Leaks

THE REAL NEWS TODAY IS THAT THERE IS NO NEWS ABOUT WASSERMAN SCHULTZ AND THE AWAN FAMILY. • Debbie Wasserman Schultz has some explaining to do, but nobody seems to want to ask her to step up to the microphone, either in Congres or in the media. • • • THE NEED FOR A SECOND SPECIAL COUNSEL. The American Spectator on July 28 that House Judiciary Committee chairmanman Bob Goodlatte and Judiciary Committee Republicans sent a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein calling for the appointment of a second special counsel to investigate unaddressed matters, some connected to the 2016 election and other matters, including many actions taken by Obama Administration officials like Attorney General Loretta Lynch, FBI Director James Comey, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The letter followed a House Judiciary Committee approval of H. Res. 446, as amended, to request documents pertaining to the FBI’s investigation of former Secretary Clinton. • The letter says that Judiciary Committee members are calling for the appointment of a second special counsel to investigate grave concerns such as former Attorney General Lynch’s directive to former FBI Director Comey to mislead the American people on the nature of the investigation into former Secretary Clinton; the FBI and Justice Department’s investigative decisions related to the Clinton email investigation, including the immunity deals given to potential co-conspirators; selected leaks of classified information that unmasked US persons incidentally collected upon by the intelligence community; and the FBI’s reliance on “Fusion GPS” in its investigation of the Trump campaign, among many others issues. What the House Judiciary Committee is asking for, says the American Spectator, is essentially "a special counsel to take us up to the major league scandal level." • • • DEBBIE AND THE THIEVES. The long-simmering and now-growing Awan brothers scandal is a monstrous Creature hiding in the Swamp. The new special counsel should be directed to look at this scandal, too. • The Awan brothers scandal started back in February when things began happening. Here is how the American Spectator describes it. The central figure is a Pakistani national named Imran Awan, who appears to be connected in some way to Pakistan’s intelligence service. Awan is an IT professional who was hired in 2004 to handle computer equipment for Florida Democrat congressman Robert Wexler. He then got a job as a shared staffer to work for Wexler’s colleague Debbie Wasserman Schultz. His boss Wasserman Schultz became the chairmanman of the Democratic National Committee, and Awan’s relationship with her led to his building a client list of some 80 Democrat House members who were using either Imran or other members of his family (his 2 brothers, one of their wives, and his own wife) in a sizable congressional IT empire he’d built. In the meantime, the Awan family was engaging in a pattern of financial activities that looked a lot like a mafia operation -- questionable real estate deals, bank fraud, kidnapping and extortion, a used-car dealership that might well have been a front for moving stolen cars to Pakistan for sale, and so on. • It all came crashing down when Awan was arrested at Dulles International Airport in late July as he tried to flee the US while the FBI and Capitol Hill Police were close to indicting him for bank fraud -- in January he had wired some $283,000 from the Congressional Federal Credit Union to two individuals in Pakistan; he was trying to board a flight to Lahore when he was arrested. But the real Awan scandal isn’t the bank fraud or the possible stolen cars -- that is all rather routine criminal stuff. • The real scandal is the stolen computers -- and the stolen information. The Awans are alleged to have illegally downloaded documents from their clients, some of whom were on the House Intelligence Committee and other sensitive committees. They also allegedly stole congressional computers. The FBI, in fact, seized a number of CPU’s and hard drives found at a house owned by Imran Awan that he was renting to a military couple after the tenants had found the equipment partially destroyed in the garage and called the authorities. What was on those hard drives has not yet been revealed. There are even allegations the Awans were blackmailing their clients with information they’d found in their emails -- use your imagination. • • • SUGGESTIONS OF DNC EMAIL THEFT. The piece de resistance is the revelation that Imran Awan -- with his foreign intelligence connections, his criminal arrest and his persistent financial problems -- had the password to Wasserman Schultz’ iPad from which she answered her email as DNC chairman. Forget about the Russians and their supposed hacking of the DNC emails. The most logical person to have gotten his hands on DNC emails and other insider information and who would have been in a position to shop them to the highest bidder was Imran Awan, who Awan was released on bond after being caught trying to flee the country. He has a tracking bracelet on his ankle, but his release seems to hint that he may have decided to cooperate with the FBI in exchange for being let out of jail. Awan’s attorney is former Bill Clinton go-fer Chris Gowen -- pause to absorb that !! The American Spectator suggests that Awan might be "rolling on Wasserman Schultz and the Clintons have decided to hang her out to dry in order to insulate themselves from whatever blowback the DNC emails might generate for them." It is impossible to reach any conclusions without more information, but stay tuned. • • • WHAT HAS WASSERMAN SCHULTZ DONE? The Daily Caller says she seemingly planned to pay cyber-probe suspect and IT aide Imran Awan even while he was living in Pakistan, if the FBI hadn’t stopped him from leaving the US. Public statements and congressional payroll records suggest she also appears to have known that his wife, a fellow IT staffer, left the country for good months ago -- while she was also a criminal suspect -- and six months of Wasserman Schultz actions reveal a decision to continue paying a man who seemingly could not have been providing services to her, and who a mountain of evidence suggests was a liability. The man long had access to all of Wasserman Schultz’s computer files, work emails and personal emails, and he was recently accused by a relative in court documents of wiretapping and extortion. • Records raise questions about whether Florida Democrat Wasserman Schultz permitted Awan to continue to access computers after House-wide authorities banned him from the network on February 2. Not only did she keep him on staff after the ban, but she also did not have any other IT person to perform necessary work that presumably would have arisen during a months-long period, according to payroll records. A House source said Awan was seen in the House office building multiple times after the network ban. “Imran Awan is working in an “advisory” role for Wasserman Schultz, her spokesman said, “providing advice on technology issues.” The spokesman wouldn’t say who did the office’s computer work after the ban, if it wasn't Awan. • Wasserman Schultz appeared to be determined to not let police see the contents of Awan's laptop, earlier threatening “consequences” for the police chief if he didn’t release it. The exchange was captured on video. Fox News reported that months later, she blocked them from looking at it but had become open to "negotiating” with police, possibly turning over certain files, as Hillary Clinton was permitted to do in deciding which emails were “personal.” According to Fox News, investigators were apparently prevented from looking at the contents of the laptop without her permission by the Constitution’s “Speech and Debate” clause, which is construed to bar law enforcement from interfering in lawmakers’ official congressional business, and which was designed to keep law enforcement from targeting lawmakers for their political views or legislative work. Of greatest concern to investigators is that Awan apparently had access to any and all of the sensitive, and/or confidential, information in her congressional computer system, including any material that could be politically embarrassing, as was the case with the hacked DNC emails which caused a disgraced Wasserman Shultz to resign as party chairman on the eve of their national convention in 2016. • Retired Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Shaffer has told Fox News that there is now evidence that then-Democratic National chairman and current congresswoman Wasserman Schultz used Imran Awan for "malevolent activities" and "manipulative things" against Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary race. Shaffer talked about Awan's other brothers who also worked on Capitol Hill, family members fleeing the country to Pakistan, and that he got paid 3 times the average Congressional IT employee -- only 100 of the 25,000 people who have worked in the House since 2010 have made more than Imran. FOX News reported on bank fraud by one of the brothers, how he double-billed the House of Representatives, and the possibility of "putting sensitive House information on the 'cloud' and potentially exposing it to outside sources." Now, says Colonel Shaffer, the FBI has come in and it looks like a foreign intelligence service called the Moslem Brotherhood may be the recipient of all this. • • • BLACKMAIL? After stonewalling for months, suddenly Wasserman Schultz’s attorney began negotiations with Capitol Police regarding the investigation. The congresswoman’s representatives wouldn’t say why she suddenly decided to cooperate with investigators after refusing to do so for months. But just as mysterious as her sudden about-face is why Wasserman Schultz refused to cooperate in the first place with an investigation into the hacking of her own office computer system, in which she was apparently the victim. House IT staffers have suggested blackmail may be involved. Pat Sowers, who has managed IT for several House offices for 12 years, told the Daily Caller in May : “I don’t know what they have, but they have something on someone. It’s been months at this point.....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." • Although the Awans made millions over the years for their House IT work, they had severe financial problems including substantial debts and a million-dollar bankruptcy. Security experts told WND the combination of money trouble and access to sensitive government information is a bright red flag marking a security risk with the potential for blackmail. The Awans were employed by three members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and five members of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, which store sensitive national security documents, including material related to terrorism, on their own committee servers. Congressional committees dealing with national security are confident their computer systems were not compromised, but the length of the investigation suggests the FBI may be looking into whether sensitive material may have been illegally accessed on the individual computer systems of the Democratic lawmakers who employed the Awan group. And, information doesn’t have to be classified to be private, privileged, extremely sensitive and of the utmost importance, or embarrassment. Consider this -- the Awans had installed everything on their clients’ systems, set up all the accounts and granted all the required permissions and restrictions, which effectively gave them full control over the lawmakers computer systems. And, their remote access meant lawmakers would never even know when the Awans were on their system. A central IT worker told WND that members of Congress were simply trying to ignore the seriousness of the problem, and “security of computer systems on the Hill is not really taken seriously.” • Five congressional IT aides told the Daily Caller they were baffled by the loyalty shown by those lawmakers who, in May, still had not fired Awan group suspects. That led them to wonder if the lawmakers were being blackmailed. A House IT employee said the new technicians who took over those offices no longer employing the Awans found some had all the office computer data sent to a secret off-site server. They also discovered a non-government iTunes account to which staffers’ iPhones were linked. • A Democratic IT contractor implied there was a cover-up, telling the Daily Caller that lawmakers are saying, “Don’t say anything, this will all blow over if we all don’t say anything.” The technician said the Awans “had [members of Congress] in their pocket,” and “there are a lot of members who could go down over this.” • WND calls the Awan affair : "One of the most bizarre spectacles in Washington [and it] is flying almost completely under the radar, even though much of it is playing out in public. And, it begs one simple question : Is someone blackmailing one of the top members of Congress in plain sight? It’s a question that demands to be asked, given the basic known facts." WND states : "With evidence piling up that her own congressional office computer was hacked, Wasserman Schultz refused to fire the suspect; gave him a new title and kept him on her payroll; apparently allowed him to continue access to her computer system; demanded Capitol Police return her laptop, a key piece of evidence in a criminal investigation; seemingly threatened to cut the department’s budget if it did not comply; and, admitted to violating official information security policy, but blamed the House’s chief administrative officer for not stopping her." WND concludes : "Her behavior is so extraordinary, it would seem to raise a question as to whether she is even trying to obstruct justice. Why would she take such risks? And why would she protect the person who is accused of victimizing her?" And, as more damning and bizarre revelations began surfacing, the national mainstream media kept turning a blind eye to the story. • • • WASSERMAN SCHULTZ AND THE DNC HACK. The Daily Caller learned that Imran Awan had the password to an iPad used by Wasserman Schultz and the DNC at the time of the publication of the hacked emails by WikiLeaks, reporting that “Imran was on call for, and on a first-name basis with, top DNC staff,” and that Wasserman’s “world -- and iPad -- mixed DNC, House and campaign business.” When the DNC emails were published by WIkiLeaks, with the politically toxic information that cost Wasserman Schultz her party chairmanship, former interim DNC chairman Donna Brazile initially claimed the emails might have been fabricated. That soon turned out not to be true, so Brazile then blamed the Russians for wanting to hurt Clinton’s presidential candidacy. What was the truth? The DNC would not let investigators find out. They refused to let the FBI examine its server, according to former FBI Director James Comey. A logical conclusion, says the Daily Caller, might be that the DNC did not want still secret but embarrassing information on the server to be revealed. The same conclusion might apply to Wasserman’s Schultz’s attempt to retrieve her laptop held by Capitol Police as evidence. • Was Imran Awan connected to the DNC hacks and leaks? Ironically, it was hacked DNC emails that showed Imran’s unusual access to the DNC computer system. WikiLeaks published an email chain that showed Garret Bonosky, deputy director of the DNC, writing on May 4, 2016 : “Amy -- I will call you shortly. I have to get this ipad thing figured out. Need to make sure I have her username and password.” DNC Assistant to chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz answered : “I do not have access to her ipad password, but Imran does.” In March, the Daily Caller asked Wasserman Schultz spokesman David Damron whether the hacked DNC emails might have come from Imran, but did not receive a response. Damron also did not respond to a request for any stronger evidence the Russians were responsible for the hacks. The Daily Caller also reported on the greater likelihood the DNC was hacked by someone known to them and trusted, rather than by a foreign government : “Computer security experts say the most common threat comes from someone abusing a position of trust, trusting the wrong person or a perpetrator manipulating someone using ‘social engineering’ to gain access; all such explanations defy the prevalent stereotype of distant strangers using high-tech tricks.” • The Washington DC policeman turned private investigator who is trying to solve the Seth Rich murder last week said that Donna Brazile is acting like "a person of interent" -- that is, someone with important information -- in his murder investigation. Earlier reports said Brazile, a close colleague of Wasserman Schultz at the DNC, was "fighting" with Seth Rich just before he was killed. Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh claims an FBI report described to him by an insider confirms that Rich, the DNC voter-expansion data director, had taken some emails to WikiLeaks and requested payment for a full trove of DNC emails during the presidential campaign. In fact, the latest DNC email released by WikiLeaks was dated May 18, 2016 -- just weeks before Rich was shot twice in the back with a handgun. Hersch said : “There are no DNC or Podesta emails that exist beyond May 21 or 22, last email from either one of those groups. What the report says is that some time in late spring...he [Seth Rich] makes contact with WikiLeaks, that’s in his computer,” Hersh says in an audio. Hersh continued : "Anyway, they found what he had done is that he had submitted a series of documents -- of emails, of juicy emails, from the DNC.” • • • DEAR READERS, all this puts former DNC chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz under the biggest scandal cloud in Washington, thanks to her tenacious support for her former IT manager, Imran Awan -- who was the ringleader of what looks like a genuine Capitol Hill crime ring that defrauded the government of millions from no-show "ghost" tech jobs and various other scams. Wasserman Schultz isn’t talking to the media, but,then, the mainstream media isn't asking her to talk. • A lot of speculation has occurred, though, about Awan possibly blackmailing Schultz and other congressional Democrats through his access to their computers. It is even suspected that Awan may have taken this access and sold secrets from the House Intel committee -- secrets that Schultz would have-- to a foreign power, or possibly to Wikileaks. • Wasserman Schultz is described as one of the poorest members of Congress, with huge debts, according to American Thinker. So, with no inherited money, a stay-at-home husband and a lot of expenses and debt, Schultz may, says American Thinker, simply be "a Democratic congresswoman as stupid as she is corrupt." • And, if Politico, the Democrat online newspaper in Wshington, is right, "the long knives have come out for Debbie Wasserman Schultz." Politico's Marc Caputo quotes Nikki Barnes, a Progressive Democrat congresswoman from Florida : "We wish she would go away and stop being so public by doubling down on negative stories.” Barnes told Caputo that she thinks Wasserman Schultz left the national party “in shambles” while chairman, ending in the hack of DNC servers and the release of embarrassing internal emails by WikiLeaks in the 2016 campaign. Instead of defending Wasserman Schultz, Barnes said : “none of this makes sense. It doesn't sound like racial profiling...there must have been something for her." "The problem with the Awan case, Barnes said, is that it’s not just hurting the congresswoman. It’s drawing negative attention to a party still healing after last year’s shocking losses and the divisive Democratic primary when Wasserman Schultz appeared to favor Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders....unfortunately, Debbie’s name does not scream trust. It screams power. It screams limited access. It screams WikiLeaks now. It screams DNC lawsuit. It screams a lot of negative things to the public. That’s not how we want to rebrand ourselves.” • Caputo says Wasserman Schultz is "already wounded prey out on the DC savannah...Over the years, as her circle of trust shrank, loyalty became an ever-more precious commodity to Wasserman Schultz, according to former staffers and top Democrats in Florida and Washington. Now, Wasserman Schultz has become such a polarizing figure in her own party that some longtime Democratic allies, when contacted by Politico, struggled to say kind words about her or explain how and why she got into this latest jam. They describe a hard-working politician with a sharp mind but an equally sharp tongue and hot temper that leads her into otherwise avoidable dust-ups and troubles. Though admired by Democrats for her fierce advocacy of Progressive causes, she nevertheless turned natural allies to enemies at the DNC, in the Obama White House and even in Florida, where she picked an explosive fight with top Democratic donor and trial lawyer John Morgan after she trashed his popular medical-marijuana initiative, seemingly without cause." Morgan told Caputo : “In politics, you’re as strong as your friends. And she doesn’t have as many as she used to. And that’s her fault.” • In a final blow, a group of Democratic donors filed a lawsuit saying Wasserman Schultz and the DNC “breached the duties they owed to...members of the DNC Donor Class by failing to exercise reasonable care and implement adequate [cyber]security protocols.” • We can say 'good-bye' to Debbie Wasserman Schultz, maybe not tomorrow, but soon. But, what we can hope for -- and demand of our Representatives and Senators, and the White House -- is that the Sessions Justice Department creates the new special counsel asked for by Republican House members to investigate the DNC role in the email leaks, the Seth Rich murder, and Wasserman Schultz' role in hanging onto the Awan gang of crooks who may have made off with US secrets and sold them to unfriendly countries or groups in the Middle East and elsewhere. • The Democrat Party's sleaziness and cynical mockery of the American rule of law has to stop.