Free Republic

A Republican lawmaker on Tuesday described the “massive” data transfers on government servers by a former IT aide to Democratic Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz as “a substantial security threat.” “These facts, standing alone, indicate a substantial security threat,” Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Scott Perry said of the Imran Awan case during an informal hearing of Republican House members on Capitol Hill on Tuesday. Awan pleaded not guilty in September to multiple federal charges including bank fraud and conspiracy. A grand jury had returned an indictment in August in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia charging Imran Awan...

Imran Awan, the IT professional Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) kept on her congressional payroll long after it became known he was under investigation by the Capitol Police, wiped his phone hours before he was arrested last July. On August 17, 2017 a federal grand jury indicted Awan and his wife, Hina Alvi, on four counts, including conspiracy and conspiring to obtain home equity loans for $165,000 and $120,000 from the Wright Patman Congressional Federal Credit Union and then transferring the money to Pakistan.

Lawyers for Imran Awan, an ex-aide who ran information technology (IT) for Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, “feel very strongly” that data recovered from a hard drive on Capitol Hill should not be valid as evidence because he put a note that said “attorney client privilege” near it before leaving it in a phone booth, they said in federal court Friday. A police report shows that the backpack contained a laptop with the username “RepDWS,” copy of Imran Awan’s ID, and the notebook. Prosecutors revealed that when they arrested Imran at the airport in July as he tried to board...

With Jon Stewart off the air, it seems the left has found a new progressive comedian it can look to for all the big cultural and public policy debates. After spending September lobbying on air to keep Obamacare, Jimmy Kimmel went on a rant this week on the “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” TV show about the horrific mass shooting that took place in Las Vegas on Sunday. He made a fairly sweeping attack on widespread gun ownership in America and generally suggested that gun control will fix the problem of gun violence.

In this installment of "On Watch: Live," JW Director of Investigations & Research Chris Farrell joins Luke Rosiak, investigative reporter of "The Daily Caller," to discuss the latest developments in the case of the Awan Brothers/DNC scandal. Luke Rosiak has been covering the story for over a year while the mainstream media has been largely silent. You can view Luke's articles on the scandal here! http://dailycaller.com/author/luke-ro...

Former Health and Human Services Administrator Kathleen Sebelius testified Tuesday in Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez’s federal corruption trial, saying she felt at one point he wanted her to “take some action.” Prosecutors allege Menendez used his political power to lobby Sebelius and others on behalf of a Florida eye doctor who overcharged Medicaid by nearly $9 million, reports Politico. In exchange for Menendez’s efforts to save the doctor from “punishment,” prosecutors charge the doctor lavished him with massive political donations and extravagant trips. The trial focused Tuesday on whether Menendez did take a bribe from the doctor, Solomon Melgen, who...

A now-indicted IT aide to various House Democrats was sending money and gifts to government officials in Pakistan and received protection from the Pakistani police, multiple relatives claim. A Democratic aide also said Imran Awan personally bragged to him that he could have people tortured in Pakistan. Awan’s lawyer acknowledged that he was sending money to a member of the Faisalabad police department, but said there was a good explanation. The relatives said Awan and his brothers were also sending IT equipment, such as iPhones, to the country during the same period in which fraudulent purchase orders for that equipment...

For those who think the conservative movement is in disarray and may be even close to cracking up, I call attention to three anniversaries being celebrated this week. These three anniversaries reflect organizations that have made a significant difference in our politics and our culture for half a century: the Media Research Center, The American Spectator, and the Fund for American Studies. Led by the irrepressible Brent Bozell, the Media Research Center is marking its 30th anniversary of exposing the left-wing bias of the mass media by the simplest of methods—using their own words to hoist them high. At its...

I wrote an article on the strange case of Imran Awan about two months ago. To summarize it briefly, Awan, his two brothers and wife, naturalized U.S. citizens born in Pakistan living in the Washington DC area, found employment as IT administrators in the House of Representatives working for as many as 80 Democratic Party congressmen. Even though they may have had little actual training in IT, they insinuated themselves into the system and were paid in excess of $5 million over the course of ten years, chief-of-staff level pay, while frequently not even showing up for work. They even...

There is infighting among editorial hierarchy at The Washington Post about it’s only “in-depth” story about the expanding Imran Awan and Hina Alvi investigation, according to sources. The story was apparently put together with the cooperation of Awan’s lawyer Chris Gowen and sweeping legal team. No FBI sources are quoted in a story dealing with a federal investigation. And more than one news veteran at the Post agreed the end result was a “puff piece” that stinks like a cheap press release written by a first-year Congressional flak. “I don’t care if the guy is guilty or not,” said one...

By the end of September federal prosecutors expect to have in their custody Hina Alvi, the wife of a controversial aide to Democratic Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Alvi has agreed to a plea deal in connection to an investigation growing since the start of the year. It is an investigation that circles the periphery of Wasserman Schultz. Coming off a tough 2016, where she ushered the Democratic National Committee into an iceberg -- and with it Hillary Clinton’s presidential aspirations -- Wasserman Schultz is possibly having an even tougher 2017. Deposed from her position in party leadership, the representative...

Multiple women in relationships with Imran Awan, the indicted former IT aide for Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, have recently called Virginia law enforcement and alleged being abused by him, police reports obtained under Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act show. Officers found one of the women bloodied and she told them she “just wanted to leave,” while the second said she felt like a “slave,” according to Fairfax County Police reports obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group. A third woman claimed she was being kept “in captivity.” The third woman is Awan’s stepmother, Samina Gilani, who said in...

A federal appeals court will hear a case brought by Judicial Watch on Friday to make public draft indictments of Hillary Clinton from the Whitewater scandal in the 1990s. Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group that files Freedom of Information Act requests, wants copies of the documents that the National Archives and Records Administration has declined to release. It filed a FOIA request for the documents in March 2015 and in October 2015 the group sued for the 238 pages of responsive records. According to Judicial Watch: “The National Archives argues that the documents should be kept secret, citing grand...

We already knew that Paul Manafort was in a heap of trouble. It was almost two months ago — July 26, to be precise — that his Virginia residence was raided by the FBI in the predawn hours. As I said at the time, prosecutors do not obtain warrants to toss the homes of people they regard as cooperating witnesses. When they are dealing with cooperators, prosecutors politely request that documents be produced, expecting the witness (and his lawyers) to comply. If some coercion is thought necessary, they will issue a grand-jury subpoena — an enforceable directive to produce documents,...

Judicial Watch recently released 1,617 new pages of documents revealing numerous additional examples of classified information being transmitted through the unsecure, non-state.gov account of Huma Abedin, Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, as well as many instances of Hillary Clinton donors receiving special favors from the State Department. The documents included 97 email exchanges with Clinton not previously turned over to the State Department, bringing the known total to date to at least 627 emails that were not part of the 55,000 pages of emails that Clinton turned over, and further contradicting a statement by Clinton that, “as far as she...

Warrant came under authority to build counterintelligence operations focused on foreign nations, not criminal cases CNN on Tuesday loudly trumpeted but then overhyped its big scoop in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation — that the former chairman of President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was the subject of a wiretap. News anchors around the clock suggested that the wiretap authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court means that political operative Paul Manafort was probably guilty and speculated that perhaps Trump himself was implicated.

The federal judge in the Awan case dismissed a crucial H-1B immigration case against the Department of Homeland Security while failing to disclose to the court that a close family relative is employed in a high-ranking intelligence capacity with DHS, federal records show and sources confirm. U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan is presiding over the Imran Awan and Hina Alvi bank fraud case in D.C. Last week Chutkan made headlines when it was reported she was appointed to the federal bench by Obama after she kicked thousands in campaign donations to his presidential campaign. Obama also appointed Chutkan’s husband,...

Climate alarmists have finally admitted that they’ve got it wrong on global warming. This is the inescapable conclusion of a landmark paper, published in Nature Geoscience, which finally admits that the computer models have overstated the impact of carbon dioxide on climate and that the planet is warming more slowly than predicted. The paper – titled Emission budgets and pathways consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 °C – concedes that it is now almost impossible that the doomsday predictions made in the last IPCC Assessment Report of 1.5 degrees C warming above pre-industrial levels by 2022 will come true. In order...

Video and photo evidence has surfaced that could prove Imran Awan maintained a chain of computer servers in the basement and locked garage area of an Alexandria, VA home he and wife Hina Alvi rented to a tenant. The embattled Awan couple did not reside at the home, however, did maintain separate internet service and a router which fed into a locked internal storage area connected to the home, according to an interview with former tenant Laurel Everly who rented the home for nine months from the Awans in 2014 and 2015. Everly has now provided photos and videos of...

On April 6, at midnight, in a small room once used as a phone booth on the second floor of the Rayburn House Office Building, a Capitol Hill Police Officer doing his security rounds discovered evidence that will possibly reveal one of the the biggest security breaches involving House Democrats by the Awan family, a group of entrusted IT staffers, according to court records, police reports and news reports. In the small room, the U.S. Capitol Police found a laptop computer registered to Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, a Florida Democrat and former DNC chairwoman. Wasserman-Schultz had been fighting authorities for months...