Imran Awan Scandal Shows Just How Much Dirt Dems Wanted to Hide By Focusing on Trump-Russia

TYLER O’NEIL: Imran Awan Scandal Shows Just How Much Dirt Dems Wanted to Hide By Focusing on Trump-Russia.

When U.S. Capitol Police, the FBI, and Customs and Border Protection teamed up to arrest Imran Awan, an IT staffer for Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) and other congressional Democrats, Americans began to realize just how broken and corrupt the Democratic Party has become. Indeed, such scandals beg the question of whether the Trump-Russia hype has not been a desperate attempt to distract the country from a long train of scandals on the Left.
Awan was arrested Monday night on charges of bank fraud, to which he has pled not guilty. As Forbes’ Frank Miniter argued, however, his strange case “has all the feeling of the opening scene of a movie that might soon include political corruption and so much more.”
Politico reported that Awan is “at the center of a criminal investigation potentially impacting dozens of lawmakers.” He was arrested after wiring $283,000 from the Congressional Federal Credit Union to Pakistan, The Daily Caller reported.
PJ Media’s Debra Heine has been on the story since it broke in February of this year. Imran Awan and his Pakistani-born brothers, Abid and Jamal Awan, are under criminal investigation by the U.S. Capitol Police and the FBI on suspicion that they accessed congressional computers without permission and stole equipment.
The Awan brothers worked for more than 30 House and Senate Democrats, as well as former Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who only fired Imran Awan on Tuesday after his arrest. News of the investigation broke in February, but Schultz kept Awan on staff for five months before firing him. Schultz even threatened Capitol Police Chief Matthew Verderosa about the investigation in May.

Weird how, since the connection to Democratic dirty-tricks firm Fusion GPS came up, the press stopped talking about the Russia “collusion” story overnight.

46 by Glenn Reynolds

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/271336/

NEW STUDY DOCUMENTS VOTER FRAUD IN 2016 ELECTION

BY PAUL MIRENGOFF IN VOTER FRAUD

I wrote here about the attempt of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity to obtain voter data from the states to determine whether, or to what extent, voter fraud is a problem. More than a few states have resisted, even though many of them make the same information available for purchase by campaigns, political parties, researchers or even the general public.

What, it must be asked, are these states trying to conceal?

A new study by the Government Accountability Institute suggests the answer. It shows that thousands of votes in the 2016 election were illegal duplicate votes from people who registered and voted in more than one state.

Our friend Hans von Spakovsky, a member of the Commission on Election Integrity, reports:

The Government Accountability Institute was able to obtain voter registration and voter history data from only 21 states because while some states shared it freely, “others impose exorbitant costs or refuse to comply with voter information requests”. . .

The institute compared the lists using an “extremely conservative matching approach that sought only to identify two votes cast in the same legal name.” It found that 8,471 votes in 2016 were “highly likely” duplicates.

Extrapolating this to all 50 states would likely produce, with “high-confidence,” around 45,000 duplicate votes.

The Government Accountability Institute wasn’t content just to match names and birthdays, which can be the same for different individuals. It contracted with companies that have commercial databases to further cross-check these individuals using their Social Security numbers and other information. When names, birthdates and Social Security numbers are matched, there is virtually no chance of false positives.

Notice that the study is confined to only one type of voter fraud — cases where an individual uses the same name to vote in more than one state. It does not capture cases of ineligible voting by noncitizens and felons — likely the most common type of fraud — and absentee ballot fraud.

Even so, 45,000 fraudulent votes is not an inconsequential number. As Hans points out, Hillary Clinton won New Hampshire by fewer than 3,000 votes out of over 700,000 cast. (New Hampshire was one of the states that refused to turn over its data for this study. There have been allegations of Massachusetts residents voting there).

In addition, the 2000 presidential election was decided by 537 votes out of a total of 105 million cast. And in 2008, Al Franken won his Minnesota Senate race by a mere 312 votes. He ended up being the deciding vote that gave this country Obamacare.

The Institute’s work should prove helpful to the Commission on Election Integrity as it overcomes obstacles thrown up by those who claim voter fraud doesn’t exist, but are unwilling to have that claim tested.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/07/new-study-documents-voter-fraud-in-2016-election.php

ISHMAEL JONES: PHONINESS OF THE TRUMP DOSSIER

 BY SCOTT JOHNSON IN 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, DONALD TRUMP, INTELLIGENCE

Our friend Ishmael Jones writes to comment on the infamous Trump “dossier.” It is one of the keys to the “collusion” hysteria and related “fake news” with which we have been inundated since the 2016 election. Ishmael Jones is the pseudonymous former CIA officer and author of The Human Factor. He notes that his comments here are based upon his experience in writing lots of intelligence reports” and that they have been approved by the CIA for publication. Mr. Jones writes:

The media continue to produce smoke in their efforts to accuse President Trump of collusion with the Russian government. But the founding document – the core set of beliefs – of the collusion story remains the infamous Russian Dossier, which is a fabrication.

I have written before on the nothingnessof the reporting on Russian collusion and I want to make it clear how phony this Dossier is from the point of view of an intelligence officer.

I do not have a magical espionage sixth sense. Rather, it is the same instinct that we all have. If you know how to fly a plane, or plant roses, or collect stamps, or play the saxophone, you have an instinctive and visceral awareness when you encounter false information involving your specialty.

For fun, you can click on these photographs, which will instinctively make you think something’s not right here. That’s the same feeling I get when I watch CNN’s reporting on intelligence issues.

Spies don’t even use the word “dossier.” They keep information in “files,” just like everybody else. English is such a rich language that we can use different words for the same object when we want to gussy things up. We don’t “eat raw cow,” we “dine upon steak tartare.” “Dossier” makes this fabrication sound better.

The heading on the Dossier says CONFIDENTIAL/SENSITIVE SOURCE which sounds official except I’ve never seen such a heading.

The first page of the Dossier gets right down to business with the golden showers accusation, that Donald Trump had women urinate upon him for his personal enjoyment. Sure, crazy things can happen, but the professional’s first instinct is skepticism. Crazy accusations with no details, no proof, no names, and no sourcing mean it didn’t happen.

The CIA has professional reports officers who review intelligence reporting. It’s as if they carry rulers, ready to rap the knuckles of any CIA case officer who writes a report like the Dossier. They demand details and the who, what, when, why, and where.

Fabrications are everywhere in both espionage and journalism. Fabricators create this stuff relentlessly for profit. Even before Al Gore invented the Internet, fabricated stories were everywhere.

Many journalists have the same standards as CIA reports officers, which is why so many journalists had already seen and dismissed the Dossier, before CNN finally took the bait.

The Dossier occasionally uses the passive voice such as “The hotel was known to be under FSB control with microphones …” or “there had been talk in the Kremlin…” The passive voice makes CIA reports officers howl, “Who knew it, why did they know it, how did they know it!” Reports officers hate the passive voice because it is misleading and weaselly. No professional spy writes in the passive voice.

The Dossier is sprinkled with words like “kompromat” and “plausible deniability” which sound like spy words but spies don’t write this way.

Fabricators try to include a bit of truth in their reporting to make the false reporting appear true. Some of the Dossier’s observations, such as that the Russians spy on other nations, are true but add nothing. Those few details that the Dossier contains have been disproven. Trump’s lawyer did not travel to Prague for a meeting with Russians, for example. Trump associates and acquaintances mentioned in the Dossier turned out to have no connection to the described events.

It takes just one blatant falsehood in a report to destroy the entire report’s integrity. When we read about court cases in which juries grant crazy awards to a plaintiff, the juries are often doing so because they are enraged at a defendant who has lied to them.

Senator John McCain sent a lackey, his own Inspector Clouseau, to London to meet with the author of the Dossier, according to Vanity Fair. The Dossier people insisted that Clouseau follow strict instructions such as the exchange of secret bona fides – as if it were a real spy mission! The fake spycraft appears to have helped convince Clouseau that he was dealing with serious spies. McCain should have just had the Dossier sent to him by email attachment.

The Dossier writers included a man who had a two year tour in Moscow, and later several years in Paris, but overall it looks like his career was a boring one, largely spent behind a desk in the UK, before he left MI6 to peddle fabrications to gullible suckers. He probably never imagined that his Dossier would become the Left’s cargo-cult belief system.

The Russian Dossier has no factual basis; belief in it is a hallucination. Some want to believe because it fits their view of the last election. Others on the Left believe in the creativity and efficiency of government employees and so it makes sense that Russian government employees, most of whom live in Russia and do not speak English, can subvert a $6,000,000,000 presidential election. The Left does not understand the limitations of intelligence bureaucracies.

Any professional spy or journalist who believes that the Dossier is valid lacks basic judgment and is unfit for his profession. The foundation of the Trump collusion story is false.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/07/ishmael-jones-phoniness-of-the-trump-dossier.php

A Demagogic Bully: The Southern Poverty Law Center demonizes respectable political opponents as “hate groups”—and keeps its coffers bulging

MARK PULLIAM: A Demagogic Bully: The Southern Poverty Law Center demonizes respectable political opponents as “hate groups”—and keeps its coffers bulging. “Ironically, the SPLC not only overlooks most of the real hate groups in operation today, along with overtly race-based organizations, such as the pro-Latino National Council of La Raza and MEChA, but also labels moderates with whom it disagrees ‘extremists’ if they deviate from its rigid political agenda, which embraces open borders, LGBT rights, and other left-wing totems. The SPLC has branded Somali-born reformer Ayaan Hirsi Ali an “anti-Muslin extremist” for her opposition to female genital mutilation and other oppressive Islamic practices, and designated the respected Family Research Council as a ‘hate group’ for its opposition to same-sex marriage. Likewise, the organization deems mainstream immigration-reform advocates such as the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) and Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) as hate groups. British Muslim activist Maajid Nawaz—regarded by most observers as a human rights leader—is suing the SPLC for listing him as an extremist.”

48 by Glenn Reynolds

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/271230/

AN ATTACK BY TRUMP “ON THE WHOLE LGBT COMMUNITY”?

BY PAUL MIRENGOFF IN LEFTISM, NATIONAL SECURITY, TRUMP ADMNINISTRATION

That’s how (minus the question mark) Steven Petrow, a gay Washington Post columnist, characterizes President Trump’s decision to reinstate the ban on transgender people in the military. This characterization tells us plenty about what’s wrong with leftist identity-politics.

The question of whether transgender people should serve in the military is first and foremost a decision about how best to defend America militarily. The purpose of our armed forces is not to promote or reject the LGBT agenda. Its purpose is not to serve as a model for tolerance of transgender and other LGBT people, or to afford them employment opportunities, or even to treat them fairly as individuals. The purpose of our armed forces is to defend the country from its enemies.

Does a ban on services by transgender people serve this purpose? I don’t know.

Petrow cites a 2016 Rand Corporation study, commissioned by the Pentagon, that led the Obama administration to lift the ban. That’s one important piece of evidence. However, it was pretty clear the direction in which Obama wanted to go, so I can’t help but wonder whether the results of the study were preordained. (For a discussion of the manipulation associated with Obama’s decision to ditch “don’t ask, don’t tell,” see this post I wrote in 2010).

Dan McLaughlin at NRO offers countervailing evidence. He cites a 2015 study by the National Center for Transgender Equality. It found:

Fifty three percent (53%) of [transgender] respondents aged 18 to 25 reported experiencing current serious psychological distress [compared to 10% of the general population] . . . Forty percent (40%) of respondents have attempted suicide at some point in their life, compared to 4.6% in the U.S. population.

Forty-eight percent (48%) of respondents have seriously thought about killing themselves in the past year, compared to 4% of the U.S. population, and 82% have had serious thoughts about killing themselves at some point in their life . . .

29% of respondents reported illicit drug use, marijuana consumption, and/or nonmedical prescription drug use in the past month, nearly three times the rate in the U.S. population (10%)

Military veteran and Bronze Star recipient David French, also at NRO, argues that the military is justified in making decisions based on group characteristics:

Do people with certain kinds of criminal backgrounds tend to be more trouble than they’re worth? They’re out. How about folks with medical conditions that have a tendency to flare up in the field. They’re out also.

It’s foolish to create a force that contains numbers of people who are disproportionately likely to have substantial problems. Increased injuries lead to manpower shortages in the field. Prolonged absences create training gaps. Physical weakness leads to poor performance.

It may well be true that military service is one way that transgender people can feel more accepted in society. Again, however, that’s not the purpose of the military.

French concludes:

The military has to make hard choices on the basis of odds, probabilities, and centuries of hard-earned experience. Our national existence – ultimately, our very civilization – depends on getting those answers right. And if there’s one thing that any person learns in war, “fairness” has absolutely nothing to do with the outcome.

The battlefield is the most unjust place on earth.

Again, I don’t know what the correct answer is on transgender people serving in the military. But I submit that French’s mode of analysis is the correct one. Focusing on whether a ban amounts to “an attack on the LBGT community” is the wrong mode.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/07/an-attack-by-trump-on-the-whole-lgbt-community.php

Intelligence chairman accuses Obama aides of hundreds of unmasking requests

The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee is accusing top political aides of President Obama of making hundreds of requests during the 2016 presidential race to unmask the names of Americans in intelligence reports, including Trump transition officials.

Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), in a letter to Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, said the requests were made without specific justifications on why the information was needed.

“We have found evidence that current and former government officials had easy access to U.S. person information and that it is possible that they used this information to achieve partisan political purposes, including the selective, anonymous leaking of such information,” Nunes wrote in the letter to Coats.

The letter was provided to The Hill from a source in the intelligence community.

In March, Nunes disclosed that he had seen data suggesting Trump campaign and transition officials were having their names unmasked by departing officials in the Obama White House.

National Security Adviser Susan Rice and CIA Director John Brennan have acknowledged making such requests though they insisted the requests were for legitimate work reasons.

Nunes recused himself from his committee’s work on its investigation over Russia’s meddling in the 2016 campaign after a controversy over his charges about Obama-era unmasking.

The chairman had reviewed intelligence reports on White House grounds that he said showed unmasking of Trump officials by Obama aides. Democrats accused him of working with the White House to make the disclosures.

In Thursday’s letter, Nunes said the total requests for Americans’ names by Obama political aides numbered in the hundreds during Obama’s last year in office and often lacked a specific intelligence community justification. He called the lack of proper justifications a “serious deficiency.”

His letter noted requests from senior government officials, unlike career intelligence analysts, “made remarkably few individualized justifications for access” to the U.S. names.

“The committee has learned that one official, whose position had no apparent intelligence related function, made hundreds of unmasking requests during the final year of the Obama administration,” Nunes wrote. “Of those requests, only one offered a justification that was not boilerplate.”

Sources familiar with the Nunes letter identified the official as then-U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power.

Power did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Nunes also wrote that “Obama-era officials sought the identities of Trump transition officials within intelligence reports.”

Nunes said he intends to introduce legislation to address concerns about the unmasking process impacting Americans' privacy.

Ordinarily, Americans whose email or phone data or conversations are intercepted by the National Security Agency without a warrant overseas are legally required to have their names redacted or masked with descriptions like “U.S. person 1” to protect their identities in intelligence reports.

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But beginning in 2011, Obama loosened the rules to make it easier for intelligence officials and his own political aides to request that the names be unmasked so they could better understand raw intelligence being gathered overseas.

The change has been criticized by liberal groups like the ACLU and conservatives like Nunes because of the privacy implications.

http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/344226-intelligence-chairman-accuses-obama-aides-of-hundreds-of-unmasking

So-Called Fact Checkers Keep Butchering The Facts About Obamacare

So-Called Fact Checkers Keep Butchering The Facts About Obamacare

All the Pinocchios.

By David Harsanyi

Since its passage, and in a way that is unlike any policy issue in modern American history, the press have rallied to the defense of Obamacare. From day one, there has been almost no light between the average liberal activist and average health-care reporter.

Or the average “fact checker,” for that matter. “Fact checking” has evolved from an occasionally useful medium to an exercise in revisionism and diversion. Take The Washington Post writer Glenn Kessler’s recent article titled “President Trump’s mangled ‘facts’ about Obamacare.” Headline readers might assume it’s just Trump doing what Trump does most of the time. I almost passed myself. Yet it turns out that all these supposedly “mangled” contentions about Obamacare are, at the very least, debatable assertions.

Kessler, for example, doesn’t approve of this Donald Trump statement: “Americans were told that premiums would go down by $2,500 per year. And instead, their premiums went up to levels that nobody thought even possible.” Other than the hyperbole (“nobody thought even possible”), this statement is substantively true.

Kessler’s ostensive debunking of the “premiums are soaring” claim is really just a confirmation that premiums have indeed risen, augmented by an argument that it wasn’t Obamacare’s fault. Kessler blames the vagaries of modern life and demographics—because these things apparently didn’t exist when Democrats were making their big unrealistic promises in 2009.

More interestingly, Kessler contends that when the former president promised Americans that their insurance premiums would drop by $2,500 for an average family, what he really meant was premiums would be $2,500 less than the anticipated rise. So in other words, according to estimates the average family is now supposedly paying $3,600 less than what they would have paid if Obamacare hadn’t been passed.

Two things: One, as we will see, Kessler (and many others) won’t accept this context when Republicans correctly use it to talk about supposed Medicaid “cuts.” Second, it’s simply not true. Obama repeatedly stated  — probably hundreds of times over a two-year span — that the bill would “reduce” the cost of premiums by $2,500 for the average family. Perhaps it exists, but I can’t find a single instance anywhere of President Obama, or anyone selling the legislation, offering a nuanced context about reductions in the rise of premiums in relation to a baseline.

Despite Kessler’s efforts at creating this equivalence, Republicans who bother to defend their potential Obamacare repeal bills are pretty explicit in explaining that Medicaid “cuts” merely slow growth in spending. So, at the very least, the former president was purposefully misleading the American people.

But according to Kessler, Obama didn’t lie or “mangle facts” or mislead anyone. Rather he gave a “misguided … pledge.” The word “misguided” intimates that Obama wasn’t misleading anyone on purpose. In another apologia on the issue, Kessler writes that “Obama was less than clear with his wording, and the Republicans took the former president’s claim at face value.” Oh, did they? The promise of lower premiums, coupled with the lie that you could keep your insurance if you liked it, were the central political selling points of ACA to the middle class. They were the only aspects of the law that would have benefited those who already had health insurance.

Moreover, Kessler does not use this generous standard to rank Republican statements about Obamacare. Obama was given two Pinocchios for making a patently false “pledge” on premiums,” and Trump was given three for pointing it out. (Update: this mark was given by Kessler’s predecessor, Michael Dobbs. So it is unfair to make the comparison.)

Kessler also doesn’t approve of Trump saying: “Insurers are fleeing the market. Last week it was announced that one of the largest insurers is pulling out of Ohio — the great state of Ohio.” From the factcheck:

Trump decries that some insurance companies have announced they are leaving the Obamacare marketplace. But he ignores that many say they are exiting the business because of uncertainty created by the Trump administration, in particular whether it will continue to pay ‘cost-sharing reductions’ to insurance companies. These payments help reduce co-pays and deductibles for low-income patients on the exchanges. Without those subsidies, insurance companies have to foot more of the bill.

Kessler accidentally forgot to mention that the uncertainty created by the “cost-sharing reductions,” subsidies meant to entice insurance companies to participate in Obamacare’s fabricated exchanges, exists because they are unconstitutional. After all, the president can’t overturn a law. Trump has no duty to pay these subsidies; in fact, he probably has a duty not to. Congress never appropriated any funding for such payments. A federal court found that the Obama administration was acting unconstitutionally when it created them.

At the very least, this was a problem caused during the writing of the bill, not by Trump. Imagine what the sentinels of democracy at The Washington Post would be saying if Trump had ignored lower court rulings on the constitutionality of a travel ban?

Whatever the case, despite Kessler’s non sequitur, Trump’s core contention that insurers are “fleeing” is well within the boundaries of a political truth. Kessler does nothing to debunk this claim. It is not mangled. Insurers were bolting before Trump became president. Here is a Kaiser Family Foundation map detailing insurance companies fleeing the Obamacare individual marketplace from 2014 to 2017.

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Axios 

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If the word “fleeing” is worthy of three Pinocchios, you’d think someone would have written a comprehensive factcheck of the Democrats’ lie that 26 million people will “lose” their health insurance due to repeal bills. Six Pinocchios! Who knows? Maybe factcheckers will get around to pointing out that 16 million of the 24 million people Democrats claim will have their coverage snatched away are people who will choose not to buy it in the absence of a penalty. No doubt, factcheckers will point out that around six million or more of those 24 million who will supposedly have their coverage “taken” from them are people the CBO just assumes would have left Obamacare markets anyway. You know, baselines and all.

It is true that Obamacare repeal legislation — whatever the specifics happen to be — is going to be unpopular. Why wouldn’t it be? It’s not merely the revisionism practiced by many in the media in regards to Obamacare. If people are persistently told that the GOP is preparing to “slash” Medicaid by a bazillion dollars and “revoke” the insurance of 26 million people, the average voter has every reason to be concerned. And if there isn’t a single Republican lawmaker out there effectively slapping down these misleading claims, voters will be. Republicans certainly can’t rely on factcheckers.

David Harsanyi is a Senior Editor at The Federalist. Follow him on Twitter.

http://thefederalist.com/2017/07/25/called-fact-checkers-keep-butchering-facts-obamacare/

Could The Trump Dynasty Last 16 Years?

EDWARD LUTTWAK: Could The Trump Dynasty Last 16 Years?

In Washington DC, post-electoral stress disorder has generated a hysteria still amply manifest after eight months: the “Russian candidate” impeachment campaign implies that any contact with any Russian by anyone with any connection to Donald Trump was ipso facto treasonous. The quality press is doing its valiant best to pursue this story, but it is a bit much to claim “collusion” – a secret conspiracy – given that, during the election campaign, Trump very publicly called on the Russians to hack and leak Hillary Clinton’s missing emails. And it did not seem especially surprising when the latest target, Donald Trump Jr, promptly released all his emails to and from the Russians to confirm that he did indeed try to help his dad by finding dirt on the other guy. As for the other impeachment track underway, triggered by the ex-FBI director James Comey’s accusation of attempted obstruction of justice, Comey’s failure to accuse Trump until he was himself fired will make it easier for the Republicans who control the House to dismiss an otherwise plausible accusation as a naive error. . . .
But another reason is that the major cause of last November’s electoral outcome has remained mostly unexplored, even un­discovered. That is not due to intellectual laziness, but rather reflects the refusal of almost all commentators to contend with the political economy that determined the outcome of the election. Long-term processes of income redistribution from working people to everyone else, non-working welfare recipients as well as the very rich, had been evident for at least two decades. . . .
In the dramatic crescendo of the 2016 elections that gave Trump to the United States and the world, very possibly for sixteen years (the President’s re-election committee is already hard at work, while his daughter Ivanka Trump is duly apprenticed in the White House that, according to my sources, she means to occupy as America’s first female President), none of the countless campaign reporters and commentators is on record as having noticed the car “affordability” statistics distributed in June 2016 via www.thecarconnection.com. Derived from very reliable Federal Reserve data, they depicted the awful predicament of almost half of all American households. Had journalists studied the numbers and pondered even briefly their implications, they could have determined a priori that only two candidates could win the Presidential election – Sanders and Trump – because none of the others even recognized that there was problem if median American households had been impoverished to the point that they could no longer afford a new car. . . . The Clinton crowd even more than the candidate herself blamed the lethargy of the TV-watching, beer-drinking, gun-owning, church-going, and cigarette-smoking “deplorables”, who unaccountably failed to avail themselves of the wonderful opportunity to leave boring assembly-line jobs or downright dangerous coal-face or oil drilling jobs to become fashion designers, foreign-exchange traders, software engineers, or even political campaign operatives.

Read the whole thing.

203 by Glenn Reynolds

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/271244/

UNDERSTANDING THE AWAN CONNECTION

BY PAUL MIRENGOFF IN CONGRESS, DEMOCRATS, INTELLIGENCE, NATIONAL SECURITY

Scott wrote today about the “Awan connection” — a scandal, finally getting some attention, that involves House staffers with ties to Pakistan who are accused of stealing equipment from members’ offices without their knowledge and committing serious, potentially illegal, violations on the House IT network. Interest in the scandal has been reinforced by the arrest of Imran Awan Monday evening as he was about to board a flight to Lahore, Pakistan.

The arrest was based on suspicion of fraud against the Congressional Federal Credit Union in a real estate loan, not IT improprieties. Still, as Scott said, something is happening here.

What, though? I’m still trying to understand this scandal or at least ask the right questions about it. In this effort, I found Jim Geraghty’s summary helpful.

Like Scott, Geraghty focuses on Debbie Wasserman Schultz, for whom Awan worked. He focuses, in particular, on her demand that Capitol Police Chief Matthew Verderosa return equipment belonging to her office that was seized as part of the investigation — or else “[expect] consequences.”

Among Geraghty’s questions are: (1) Why was Wasserman Schultz so impatient to get her computer back from the Capitol Police if it’s relevant to a criminal investigation and (2) Why did she keep Imran Awan on staff until this week? The IT scandal broke in February.

I’d also like to know more about the security implications of the theft of the IT equipment and the “serious, potentially illegal, violations of House IT policies.” The theft and breaches of policy reportedly affect the offices of more than 20 members of Congress.

Which members? In addition to Wasserman Schultz, Awan and his family membersreportedly have worked for Democrats on the most important House committees from a national security and foreign policy standpoint:

The five. . .employees worked for at least three members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and five members of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs were among the dozens of members who employed the suspects on a shared basis. The two committees deal with many of the nation’s most sensitive issues, information and documents, including those related to the war with radical Islamic terrorism.

Jamal Awan handled IT for Rep. Joaquin Castro, a Texas Democrat who serves on both the intelligence and foreign affairs panels.

Imran Awan handled IT for Rep. Gregory Meeks, a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee where he is the Ranking Member on the Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia, and Emerging Threats.

Imran Awan also worked for Rep. Andre Carson, an Indiana Democrat and one of two Muslims in the House of Representatives, and Rep. Jackie Speier, a California Democrat. Both are members of the intelligence committee.

The Awans were well-compensated for their services to congressional Democrats. Yet, asGeorge Raisley chronicles, they were involved in multiple suspicious mortgage transfers and a debt-evading bankruptcy. One of them, Abid Awan, reportedly had more than $1 million in debts following a failed business. Court documents claim that Abid stole money and vehicles from associates in that business.

And, as noted, Imran Awan is now accused of bank fraud to the tune of $165,000.

Raisley also says the Awans controlled a limited liability corporation called Cars International A (CIA), a car dealership with odd finances that took, but did not repay, a $100,000 loan from one Dr. Ali Al-Attar. According to Raisley, laundering money through used car dealerships is a known Hezbollah tactic.

Raisley also cites a former CIA officer who says Dr. Attar, the man who loaned the Awans car dealership $100,000, “was observed in Beirut, Lebanon conversing with a Hezbollah official” in 2012, shortly after the loan was made.

Hezbollah aside, the danger posed by scandal-plagued, debt-ridden IT professionals on Capitol Hill is obvious, especially when (1) they have access to national security information and (2), if I may say so, when they are connected to Pakistan. It’s impossible not to wonder who may have received data the Awans had access to, especially given Pakistan’s history of collaborating with a various foreign countries and entities — including both friends and foes of America.

Finally, according to Raisley, Imran Awan had access to Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s iPad password. This probably means the brothers had direct access to DNC emails. Might they have sold them to Russians? Might they have sold them to non-Russians?

Clearly, I’ve entered the realm of speculation. But if the mainstream media is going to speculate endlessly about President Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia, shouldn’t it also be speculating about the Awan connection? And if Trump is to be investigated endlessly by the government, shouldn’t the Awan connection be investigated, as well?

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/07/understanding-the-awan-connection.php