POINTS TO “DEMOCRAT I.T. SCANDAL” AS SOURCE OF “MUCH OF THE CORRUPTION WE SEE TODAY”
by Sharon Rondeau
(Jun. 7, 2018) — On Thursday morning, President Trump tweeted his thoughts on the Special Counsel investigation and other current events, including reports which say that a former IT aide to House Democrats may soon enter a “guilty” plea to charges of bank fraud, conspiracy, and “making false statements.”
Early last year, The Daily Caller broke the story that a number of former Pakistani nationals, all family members, were employed as IT aides in the U.S. House of Representatives and paid unusually large salaries for their work. On February 4, 2017, The DC reported:
Three brothers who managed office information technology for members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and other lawmakers were abruptly relieved of their duties on suspicion that they accessed congressional computers without permission.
Brothers Abid, Imran, and Jamal Awan were barred from computer networks at the House of Representatives Thursday, The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group has learned.
Three members of the intelligence panel 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 and documents, including those related to the war on terrorism.
Although the Awan brothers were terminated from their jobs shortly thereafter, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), retained Imran Awan until he was charged with “bank fraud” last July as he was preparing to board a flight to Pakistan.
In September, The Washington Examiner reported that Imran Awan “worked directly for Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., when she was chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee.” On the same date, a Republican strategist told FNC’s Tucker Carlson that Wasserman Schultz extended other unusual amenities to the Awans and that other members of Congress “have been censured for far less nefarious activities than this.”
She also said that Wasserman Schulz may have committed “obstruction of justice” for attempting to hide a computer from the Capitol Police, who were investigating the Awans’ work associated with the House’s IT systems. According to both the strategist and The DC, the Awans had access to documents belonging to the House Intelligence and Foreign Affairs Committees.
On Wednesday, Luke Rosiak of The DC told “Fox & Friends” that the charges against Imran Awan expanded to his wife, Hina Alvi, and that both now face multiple charges. Rosiak said that the investigation into the aides began in 2016 and that Wasserman Schultz, after she was made aware that Awan was under investigation, nevertheless hired his wife, Alvi.
In the spring of last year, Alvi fled to Pakistan with the couple’s children but agreed to return to the U.S. in September to face the charges.
Trump’s first tweet on Thursday dealt with his upcoming trip to the G-7 Summit in Charlevoix, Quebec, Canada and his meeting on Tuesday in Singapore, the first of its kind for a sitting U.S. president, with the leader of North Korea. Trump then tweeted his continuing frustration at the investigation being overseen by Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller, III, which he has referred to frequently as “a witch hunt.”
Trump’s frequent references to “13 Angry Democrats” are to 13 of the 17 prosecutors Mueller hired to conduct his two-pronged investigation into whether or not anyone from the Trump campaign “colluded” with Russia and the extent to which Russian operatives allegedly interfered in the 2016 election.
His second tweet wished Alice Marie Johnson, a woman who spent almost 22 years in federal prison on a non-violent drug charge, “good luck” and “a wonderful life” after he commuted her life sentence on Wednesday and she was released to her family.
Trump’s third tweet quoted Harvard University Law Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz, who told “Fox & Friends” Thursday morning that he found the Special Counsel’s investigation “not the way justice should operate” (3:53 in linked video). “So true!” Trump opined.
The next tweet repeated some of the same complaints from the first about Mueller’s investigation but asked a new question: “Where is the server?”
The question likely refers to the server belonging to the DNC said by the US intelligence community and mainstream media to have been “hacked” by Russian operatives.
On July 22, 2016, the open-government organization Wikileaks began releasing thousands of emails obtained from the server demonstrating that Wasserman Schultz and other top DNC officials had attempted to ensure that Clinton received the Democratic presidential nomination over Sen. Bernie Sanders regardless of how people voted in the primaries.
The emails also showed coordination with certain members of the mainstream press and disdain for certain groups of Americans, presumably their own constituents.
Following the initial release of emails, Wasserman Schultz resigned as DNC chairman along with three other officials.
Wikileaks continued to release batches of embarrassing communications through late October 2016, within just days of the presidential election, one of dozens of factors on which Clinton blamed her loss to Trump.
During sworn congressional testimony, now-former FBI Director James Comey confirmed that the DNC did not allow the server to be inspected by the law-enforcement agency. Instead, the DNC hired Crowdstrike, a private firm, which reported that Russian operatives were responsible for the breach.
Internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom has publicly stated that he possesses evidence showing that the DNC server was not “hacked,” but rather, accessed with “a memory stick,” the contents of which were then conveyed to WikiLeaks. “I was involved,” Dotcom stated on Twitter in May of last year.
Dotcom maintains that the late Seth Rich, who was the DNC’s data director until he was killed outside of his Washington, DC apartment on July 10, 2016 by as-yet unidentified assailants, was the operator of the memory stick.
Rich’s surviving family members have rejected that claim and filed respective lawsuits against news organizations which have published claims supportive of the theory that their son and brother was involved in the transfer of the emails to WikiLeaks.
At one point last year, Dotcom accused the Rich family of defaming him and threatened to take legal action against them, after which nothing further was heard.
A large majority of mainstream media outlets has attempted to “debunk” the theory that Rich might have participated in the transfer of the emails and numerous attachments to Wikileaks arguably to discourage investigation and/or questioning of the findings of the “intelligence community.”
Trump’s next two tweets expressed his distaste for retiring Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, who has expressed similar sentiments toward Trump, and announced Trump’s noontime meeting with Japan’s Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, in advance of the summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un.
However, the following tweet again raised the Awan investigation and Wasserman Schultz’s apparent role in shielding at least two of the involved individuals from scrutiny. “Our Justice Department must not let Awan & Debbie Wasserman Schultz off the hook,” Trump tweeted. “The Democrat I.T. scandal is a key to much of the corruption we see today. They want to make a ‘plea deal’ to hide what is on their Server. Where is Server? Really bad!”
To this writer’s knowledge, the tweet was the first claim made by a government official that a nexus exists between the Awans and the breached DNC server.