[TravelerKai]

If that is true, that is beyond ridiculous. Just goes to show you that no Democrat lawyers from Lynch's DOJ that are leftover, including herself have any legal ethics whatsoever. None of them know how to recuse themselves. This is why I did not think Sessions was wrong to recuse himself. Good lawyers know when to do it and do not wait for others to demand they step away and recuse.

He needs to be fired for this by Sessions, for having to be told to recuse. Maybe firing Sessions for allowing this to happen might be appropriate, but not because he recused himself from Russia matters, but because of this.

[Handsome Creepy Eel]

Who assigned Steven Wasserman to this case? That's the person that needs to be fired.

[Kid Twist]

Recap from Molyneux (lengthy):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKzzyOsvajc

Can Trump not already be aware of all of this and the data on the computers that were hidden, taken, or attempted to be destroyed?

[budoslavic]

[url=https://twitter.com/polNewsForever/status/893531427505131521][/url]

[John Michael Kane]

She's not finished if Steven Wasserman destroys or tampers with or "loses" that laptop. I want to know the chain of custody and where that device is now. Sessions needs to take personal control of the situation and put that thing under lock and key in an undisclosed location until the hardrive can be cloned and investigated by I.T. specialists.

[CynicalContrarian]

[url=https://twitter.com/polNewsForever/status/893618114188894209][/url]

Oh...

[budoslavic]

[url=https://twitter.com/RealJamesWoods/status/896142557192663040][/url]

[John Michael Kane]

We still don't have a special prosecutor on this. Not good. Honestly, this case is going nowhere unless Trump picks the right man for the job himself. The DOJ is full of Obama-era plants.

[budoslavic]

(08-11-2017 06:01 PM)John Michael Kane Wrote:  

We still don't have a special prosecutor on this. Not good. Honestly, this case is going nowhere unless Trump picks the right man for the job himself. The DOJ is full of Obama-era plants.

That's exactly what I think is going on right now. Without a special prosecutor, people are not going to be pleased to see Debbie getting away with this kind of crap if nothing's being done. The Democrats are obstructing President Trump’s nominees to numerous government positions and it's pissing a lot of people off.

[John Michael Kane]

Lets pray they get the right man for the job to actually prosecute this cheating traitorous bitch and her terrorist I.T. staff. They all need to hang.

[Samseau]

(08-11-2017 06:24 PM)budoslavic Wrote:  

(08-11-2017 06:01 PM)John Michael Kane Wrote:  

We still don't have a special prosecutor on this. Not good. Honestly, this case is going nowhere unless Trump picks the right man for the job himself. The DOJ is full of Obama-era plants.

That's exactly what I think is going on right now. Without a special prosecutor, people are not going to be pleased to see Debbie getting away with this kind of crap if nothing's being done. The Democrats are obstructing President Trump’s nominees to numerous government positions and it's pissing a lot of people off.

And that's an old article. Even fake news show the nominations are still waaaaaaay behind schedule:

http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/07/politics/t...index.html

Quote:

Any new administration has to fill roughly 4,000 positions across the government, more than 1,200 of which require Senate confirmation. While no administration can accomplish that task in 200 days, the nonprofit good-government group Partnership for Public Service recommends having the most important 300-400 confirmed by August recess.
Trump hasn't come close.
The President got a big boost to his progress last week when the Senate confirmed en masse more than five dozen outstanding nominees -- roughly doubling the number of nominees Trump has had confirmed.
But he still remains far behind.
As of August 4, when the Senate left town for its August recess, Trump has nominated 277 people for key posts, has had 124 confirmed, and has withdrawn eight of the nominations, according to CNN's tracker.

Democrats literally killing our country by refusing to staff the executive branch.

CNN actually has an amazing tracker worth visiting:

http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2017/poli...index.html

You can see the obstruction in real time.

[budoslavic]

Latest court update on Imran Awan.

Quote:

VIDEO: Awan Asks Judge To Remove GPS, Citing Possible Emergency With Kids In Pakistan


A former House of Representatives IT aide was arraigned in federal court Friday on four felony fraud charges, appearing with three attorneys including Chris Gowen, a former close aide to Hillary and Bill Clinton.

Gowen asked that Imran Awan’s GPS monitoring bracelet be removed, citing that Imran might need to attend to an emergency with his children. In a press conference outside court, Gowen admitted that the children are in Pakistan and refused to explain the discrepancy.

“His ability to parent, which may well be single parenting, if there is an emergency…” Gowen said.

He also asked for other restrictions on his movement to be lifted, saying he has been driving for Uber, but the company had no record of any driver matching several variations of Imran’s name.

Prosecutor Michael Mirando opposed the motions, saying Imran is a severe flight risk. “From Day 1 there was a pattern of flight. It began September 2016… a pattern of transfers to Pakistan, hundreds of thousands of dollars,” he said. The judge has not ruled on the motion.

Imran tried to board a flight to Pakistan in July, but the FBI arrested him at the airport. His wife, Hina Alvi, is already in Pakistan, having taken her kids out of school without notifying their Virginia school system and boarded a flight with household goods, and Mirando said authorities are sure she has no intention to return.

Hina bought a round-trip ticket with a return ticket in September, but prosecutors said they don’t expect to see her in America in the next few weeks.

“She gave every impression to the government that she was leaving the country with no intention to return,” he said.

Throw him jail. Let him be somebody's bitch in prison.

[John Michael Kane]

This guy should have been denied bail! GPS freakin' braclet?



His wife has already fled the country, they've already drained the bank accounts, what corrupt judge allowed this guy to post bail? He should be in a secret black site where only Trump's personal staff is watching him so he doesn't shoot himself in the back of the head fifteen times.

[MidJack]

(09-02-2017 03:39 PM)John Michael Kane Wrote:  

This guy should have been denied bail! GPS freakin' braclet?

His wife has already fled the country, they've already drained the bank accounts, what corrupt judge allowed this guy to post bail? He should be in a secret black site where only Trump's personal staff is watching him so he doesn't shoot himself in the back of the head fifteen times.

He is under surveillance. If he runs to somebody for help, depending on who he goes to, that is more evidence for a case against the bigger fish.

[John Michael Kane]

Too big of a risk IMHO. Better to secure him in secret custody where the Clinton machine can't get to him. If they think he'll flip and talk, they'll kill him unless the wife is holding some type of insurance policy. This whole thing resembles a Tom Clancy novel. Unreal.

[oilbreh]

Ill be laughing if this amounts to anything. Stingy IT guy involved in upper echelons on Government fucks every one by waiting for a scrap metal place that will take his hard drives.

[John Michael Kane]

I really want a major scalp, which hasn't happened since Trump took office. His DOJ has gone hard after pedos, which is great, but bit-time political and business criminals have gone largely free. We need some white-collar crime prosecuted for people to truly believe in Drain the Swamp.

[budoslavic]

Well now, shit me not...Imran Awan allegedly routed data from numerous House Democrats to a secret server.

Quote:

EXCLUSIVE: DWS IT Guy Was Banned From House After Trying To Hide Secret Server


A secret server is behind law enforcement’s decision to ban a former IT aide to Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz from the House network.

Now-indicted former congressional IT aide Imran Awan allegedly routed data from numerous House Democrats to a secret server. Police grew suspicious and requested a copy of the server early this year, but they were provided with an elaborate falsified image designed to hide the massive violations. The falsified image is what ultimately triggered their ban from the House network Feb. 2, according to a senior House official with direct knowledge of the investigation.

The secret server was connected to the House Democratic Caucus, an organization chaired by then-Rep. Xavier Becerra. Police informed Becerra that the server was the subject of an investigation and requested a copy of it. Authorities considered the false image they received to be interference in a criminal investigation, the senior official said.

Data was also backed up to Dropbox in huge quantities, the official said. Congressional offices are prohibited from using Dropbox, so an unofficial account was used, meaning Awan could have still had access to the data even though he was banned from the congressional network.

Awan had access to all emails and office computer files of 45 members of Congress who are listed below. Fear among members that Awan could release embarrassing information if they cooperated with prosecutors could explain why the Democrats have refused to acknowledge the cybersecurity breach publicly or criticize the suspects.

House Democrats employed Awan and four family members for years as IT aides. After learning of the House probe, Awan and his wife, Hina Alvi, frantically transferred money to accounts in their native Pakistan.

Awan and Alvi were indicted in August on fraud charges related to the transfers, but they have not yet been charged with criminal cybersecurity violations partly because some of the 45 Democrats have been passive about helping build the case, the House official said.

Each House member’s data is supposed to be stored on his own server, but Imran moved files to a computer that was only supposed to hold the files of the administrative office of the Democratic Caucus, the senior official said.

In the spring of 2016, House administrators became aware that the Awans were allegedly falsifying purchase orders. They followed the trail and found that the misconduct extended to a major cybersecurity breach.

On Jan. 24, 2017, Becerra vacated his congressional seat to become California’s attorney general. “He wanted to wipe his server, and we brought to his attention it was under investigation. The light-off was we asked for an image of the server, and they deliberately turned over a fake server,” the senior official said.

“They were using the House Democratic Caucus as their central service warehouse … It was a breach. The data was completely out of [the members’] possession. Does it mean it was sold to the Russians? I don’t know,” the senior official said.

Capitol Police considered the image a sign that the Awans knew exactly what they were doing and were going to great lengths to try to cover it up, the senior official said. The House Sergeant-at-Arms banned them from the network as a result.

The senior official said the data was also funneled offsite via a Dropbox account, from which copies could easily be downloaded. Authorities could not immediately shut down the account when the Awans were banned from the network because it was not an official account.

“For members to say their data was not compromised is simply inaccurate. They had access to all the data including all emails. Imran Awan is the walking example of an insider threat, a criminal actor who had access to everything,” the senior official said.

The executive director of the Democratic Caucus was Sean McCluskie, who was Becerra’s chief of staff and is now chief deputy attorney general of California. McCluskie did not return TheDCNF’s repeated requests for comment.

Despite Democrats’ acute awareness of the importance of cybersecurity after the Democratic National Committee’s emails appeared on Wikileaks in July 2016, the employing members have gone to great lengths to avoid condemning Awan or have said nothing about whether they checked their office data’s security following the breach.

“After being notified by the House Administration Committee, this individual was removed from our payroll. We are confident that everything in our office is secure,” a spokesman for Michigan Democratic Rep. Sander Levin told TheDCNF in February. Levin’s chief of staff Nick Gwyn refused this week to square the assessment with the secret server and Dropbox arrangement.

A spokesman for Ohio Democratic Rep. Marcia Fudge said in August that she terminated Awan after learning of the criminal investigation but claimed “there’s no indication that he stole information or did anything inappropriate.” Fudge’s spokesman would not clarify the August statement this week.

Since Fudge and other members have not acknowledged that the breach occurred, there is no reason to think they took action to investigate where their data might have gone and mitigate any harm to constituents and others.

Wasserman Schultz has acknowledged that chiefs of staff were informed that the Awans were under investigation for what she characterized as “data transfer violations.” She refused to fire Awan even after he was banned from touching official computers, and she used a May 17, 2017, budget hearing with the House Chief Administrative Officer to attack authorities for not stopping her from breaking the Dropbox rule.

“I am more than happy to admit that I use Dropbox. I have used it for years and years and years. It is not blocked. I am fully able to use it,” she said. Administrators told her they had clearly communicated the rules to IT aides, but instead of faulting Awan for not following them, Wasserman Schultz lashed out at the House for “just lobbing e-mail into a tech person’s inbox.”

The senior official said the Awans’ enterprise-scale use of Dropbox was not the casual use of a popular consumer application, but the funneling of huge quantities of data offsite where it could not be taken back by House authorities.

Becerra was one of five members who first hired Awan in 2004, his first year on the Hill. Only two of the five — Rep. Gregory Meeks of New York and Becerra — remained in office through 2016, and each of them later put two of Awan’s relatives on their payrolls as well, including his wife Alvi and brother Abid.

When Becerra became chairman of the Democratic Caucus in 2013, that office began paying Alvi $25,000 to $30,000 a year in addition to the payments from Becerra’s personal office, meaning he was responsible for far more of the payments to the Awan family than any other member.

[John Michael Kane]

This story keeps getting worse and worse, yet the Old Media refuses to cover it. This very well could be the scandal of the century and these crooks in the media refuse to alert the American people as to what the hell is going on. Disgusting!

[C-Note]

Good grief. The Amazon Washington Post should be all over this story because DC is supposedly "their territory" and they're supposed to be the "paper of record" on the federal government and Capital Hill gossip. They should be all over this story but they've barely mentioned it.

[DamienCasanova]

FBI: Awans Security Clearances “Forged;” Granted Access to Congressional Intel Despite Falsified Vetting
http://truepundit.com/fbi-awans-security...d-vetting/

Federal law enforcement agents working the Imran Awan and Hina Alvi fraud probe said the couple, along with other members of the family, were never properly vetted for Congressional security clearances.

Instead the clearances, which provided the Awans access to dozens of Congressional Democrats computer networks and IT systems, were likely approved absent each individual background file getting “fully investigated.”

“I seriously doubt they could have passed a full background (check),” one FBI insider said. “These clearances were pushed through.”

FBI insiders used the word “forged” to describe the process of what happened to the Awan files. Federal law enforcement sources with knowledge of the case divulged:

Either someone with clout in Congress, or higher, made sure the Awans received their security clearances despite glaring problems or the investigators pushed their files through for approval as part of a systemic breakdown.

Many assertions in the Awan-linked applications and files could not be verified by subsequent FBI vetting as part of the criminal case now pending against Imran and Hina. The files are problematic, FBI sources said.

The FBI did not conduct the background checks on members of the Awan family who were granted security clearances in Congress.


Anonymous Conservative with some great analysis on that also

http://www.anonymousconservative.com/blo...es-forged/

Here is the thing. I could run for Congress and attain a high ranking position there, and there are corners of the government where I would have no power to influence anyone, let alone the real authority in deep state. If I were a normal Congressman, I would probably have trouble even proving those corners of government existed, let alone bringing any sort of authority down on them. Even sympathetic FBI agents have no authority over some things, things seemingly controlled by those in power.

It is unimaginable the FBI is not doing its own background checks on everyone with access to classified information in Congress. Even if OPM is technically responsible for the checks, FBI counter-intelligence is doing their own thing behind the scenes to secure national security. FBI Counter Intelligence will not know there is a hole like that, and fail to plug it by any means necessary.

No normal Congressman, no matter their rank, is getting the FBI to forge or ignore it’s covert background checks by themselves. Congressmen are the puppets. If a Congressman wanted something done at FBI, he would have to be a puppet of the real power players, and he would have to ask them to pull rank on the FBI as a favor.

It is not impossible somebody in Congress wanted Awan to get his clearance, but with his background, Awan was not getting a clearance unless some power player in the Deep State intel world wanted it – and if they wanted it, the natural assumption would be Awan was providing Congress’ emails and computer communications in return.

Of course if that were the case, then the Awan investigation will never go anywhere, and it will simply fizzle out quietly, as even the FBI, and even the President are forced to look on powerlessly.

It is wild as the collapse approaches how much weirdness arises which just peters out, without so much as a second glance by the authorities in charge. Meanwhile President Trump has a massive investigation with a Special Prosecutor looking at a Russian connection that doesn’t even exist, or even involve the President himself in its allegations – and I will not be surprised it is sends some people to jail, or even cripples Trump’s Presidency.

[Enoch]

(09-14-2017 08:26 AM)C-Note Wrote:  

Good grief. The Amazon Washington Post should be all over this story because DC is supposedly "their territory" and they're supposed to be the "paper of record" on the federal government and Capital Hill gossip. They should be all over this story but they've barely mentioned it.

Are you suggesting that WaPo has an agenda. Never! No journalist answers to the man who signs his check, I swear to God.

[budoslavic]

The Imran Awan story continues to get worse because a top Democrat Xavier Becerra - current California Attorney General - was caught giving officials a fake server related to the Imran Awan investigation.

Quote:

BREAKING: Imran Awan Downloaded “Terabits” of Info to Dropbox — May Have Sold DNC Emails

“IT specialist” Imran Awan worked for Debbie Wasserman Schultz for thirteen years since she was first elected to national office in 2004 as a Florida representative.

She only fired him after he was arrested and would have kept paying her “IT expert” even after he fled to Pakistan.

The Awan brothers IT ring had access to emails and computer data from an estimated 800 lawmakers and staffers.

Three Pakistani brothers who managed the IT affairs for several Democratic government officials were relieved of their duties in February on suspicion that they accessed specific computer networks without permission, also known as hacking.

Imran Awan, who started working for Wasserman Schultz in 2005, received $164,600 in 2016, with close to $20,000 of that coming from Wasserman Schultz.

His brother Jamal, who started working as a staffer in 2014, was paid $157,350.12 in 2016. Abid, who started working in 2005, was paid $160,943 in 2016.

Imran’s wife, Hina Alvi, who was employed as a staffer since February 2007, was paid 168,300 in 2016. Rao Abbas was paid $85,049 in 2016.

Abid, Imran, and Jamal Awan were barred from computer networks at the House of Representatives in February.

Most of the House Members fired the Awans subsequently.
Only Debbie Wasserman Schultz kept Imran Awan on the pay roll up to the day he got arrest for Bank Fraud after trying to flee the country.

The rest of the family fled since months to Pakistan along with hundreds of thousands of tax-payer money they mysteriously were able to wire.

Democrats were willing or unwillingly compromised by the Awans and Sensitive Information leaked to foreign Enemies! (Muslim Brotherhood – Yemen Raid with dead soldier for example?) Many of them have Seats on Committees that handle highly sensitive information.

Last week Capitol Police confirmed Wasserman Schultz’s laptop was found in phone booth at 3 AM with a note to US attorney attached from Imran Awan.

Now this story gets REALLY INTERESTING—-

Top Democrat Xavier Becerra, the current California Attorney General, was caught giving officials a fake server related to the Imran Awan investigation.

The Daily Caller News Foundation reported:

Now-indicted former congressional IT aide Imran Awan allegedly routed data from numerous House Democrats to a secret server. Police grew suspicious and requested a copy of the server early this year, but they were provided with an elaborate falsified image designed to hide the massive violations. The falsified image is what ultimately triggered their ban from the House network Feb. 2, according to a senior House official with direct knowledge of the investigation.

The secret server was connected to the House Democratic Caucus, an organization chaired by then-Rep. Xavier Becerra. Police informed Becerra that the server was the subject of an investigation and requested a copy of it. Authorities considered the false image they received to be interference in a criminal investigation, the senior official said.

NOW THIS–A House official told Circa News that Imran Awan may have sold the uploaded info. Everyone is talking about Russia but Awan could have been the one to have sold the DNC emails. The DNC refuses to hand over their servers to be investigated. If they really were the victim of a ‘hack’ like they claim, they wouldn’t be protecting their servers from authorities.

Circa News:
The House official told Circa that Awan was also allegedly uploading “terabits of information to dropbox so he was possibly able to access the information even after he was banned from the network.” The official said there is a need for a full congressional investigation on the matter.

“I think this may lead to information as to who really accessed the DNC server – everybody talks about Russia – but look at the access (Awan) had and potentially those emails could have been sold,” the House official added.

[John Michael Kane]

The attorney general, otherwise known as the "top cop" and "top lawyer" for the State of Kommiefornia was caught tampering with evidence and is clearly obstructing the case. Only in this leftist hellhole is this considered normal and acceptable behavior. The arrogance of the Dems when it comes to criminal behavior is to be expected because they've gotten away with it for far too long. I hope they all rot in a jail cell. They deserve the rope for this criminal lawlessness. They are weakening what shreds of faith people have in the institution of government.

[C-Note]

The Washington Post finally did a story on it. It has some good details, but as you would expect it tries to downplay the seriousness of the situation and puts many of the details that make Wasserman Schultz look bad towards the bottom of the article:

Quote:

Federal probe into House technology worker Imran Awan yields intrigue, no evidence of espionage

In late September 2016, leaders in the House of Representatives met behind closed doors for briefings on a closely held investigation into a group of computer technicians working on Capitol Hill.

Investigators with the Inspector General’s Office had been quietly tracking the five IT workers’ digital footprints for months. They were alarmed by what they saw. The employees appeared to be accessing congressional servers without authorization, an indication that they “could be reading and/or removing information,” according to documents distributed at the previously unreported private briefings.

For some who listened to the findings, the fact that the employees were born in Pakistan set off alarms about national security, according to two participants who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Others thought it more likely that the IT workers, naturalized U.S. citizens, were bending rules on network access to share job duties — violations of House protocol, perhaps, but not espionage.

The matter was soon referred to the Capitol Police, who have been assisted in their investigation by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. In February, the IT workers were barred from accessing the House network, a development that quickly made headlines.

Since then, the story of the House IT workers — brothers Imran Awan, Abid Awan and Jamal Awan, as well as Imran Awan’s wife, Hina Alvi, and friend Rao Abbas — has become a lightning rod charged by the convergence of politics, cybersecurity and fears of foreign intrusion.

It has attracted unfounded conspiracy theories and intrigue. Far-right news organizations seized on it as a potential coverup of an espionage ring that plundered national secrets and might have been responsible for the campaign hacking of the Democratic National Committee, a breach that intelligence agencies have linked to Russia. President Trump has fanned its embers from his Twitter account, reposting an article that claimed the mainstream media were ignoring a scandal “engulfing” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Florida Democrat who was slow to fire Imran Awan after news of the investigation broke.

Yet, according to a senior congressional official familiar with the probe, criminal investigators have found no evidence that the IT workers had any connection to a foreign government. Investigators looking for clues about espionage instead found that the workers were using one congressional server as if it were their home computer, storing personal information such as children’s homework and family photos, the official said.

Even so, the story — reconstructed here after The Washington Post reviewed confidential documents and interviewed more than a dozen people, including House officials, witnesses and others, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive investigation — highlights urgent and persistent questions about how well Congress safeguards computer equipment and data.

Lawyers for some of the IT workers told The Post that their clients had done nothing wrong.

Christopher J. Gowen, one of Imran Awan’s lawyers, called the espionage claims “ludicrous.”

“There’s nothing that Imran did that wasn’t requested by one of his clients on House staff,” he said.

Jim Bacon, a lawyer representing Abid Awan, said “a very lax environment” surrounds security protocols in the House. “I can tell you what they were doing was not unusual,” he said.

The nearly one-year-old investigation has thus far resulted in no charges related to the group’s House IT work. It has burrowed deeply into their personal finances and outside business ventures.

In July, prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia charged Imran Awan and Alvi with bank fraud, alleging that the couple made misrepresentations on an application for a home-equity loan.

Imran Awan was arrested at the airport as he was preparing to board a flight to Pakistan, where his wife and three children — ages 4, 7, and 10 — have been since March. He has pleaded not guilty. Alvi is planning to return to the United States in the coming weeks to face bank-fraud charges, according to court records. None of the other IT workers has been accused of wrongdoing.

The investigation is ongoing. Both the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office declined to comment.

Chosen in a lottery

Imran Awan, now 38, was a 14-year-old living in Pakistan when he filled out an application for a U.S. program that provides limited green cards through a lottery system, his lawyers said. He and his family were chosen. He arrived at 17, got a job working at a fast-food restaurant and went to community college in Northern Virginia. He transferred to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and earned a degree in information technology.

Awan became a U.S. citizen in 2004, his lawyers said, the same year he was hired for a part-time job as an IT specialist in the office of Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.). Awan had gotten to know some of Wexler’s staffers as an intern for a company that provided services to the office.

As an IT specialist, Awan set up printers and work email accounts for new employees, and did technical troubleshooting. Charismatic and accommodating, he became a popular choice among House Democrats and soon cobbled together more than a dozen part-time jobs as what is known as a “shared employee” on the Hill, floating between offices on an as-needed basis.

Such arrangements came under scrutiny in 2008 when House Inspector General James J. Cornell testified that there was “inadequate oversight” over shared employees.

“In most instances, they have all the freedom of a vendor and all the benefits of an employee without the accountability one would expect with an employee,” Cornell told lawmakers. IT specialists, he noted, “present an additional risk in that they often have access to multiple office’s data outside of both the oversight of congressional office staff and the visibility of House security personnel.”

As demand for Awan’s services grew, he began recommending his family members, who had less formal training. His brother Abid, 33, started working on Capitol Hill in 2005. His wife, 33, joined in 2007. A friend, Rao Abbas, 37, who had most recently worked as a manager at a McDonald’s, was hired in 2012. And Imran’s youngest brother, Jamal, 24, started in 2014. Each held part-time jobs in multiple Democratic congressional offices.

“At the end of the day, whether they had formal training or not, they were trained on the job by Imran,” said one of Imran Awan’s lawyers, Aaron Marr Page.

By 2016, the five worked for a combined three dozen lawmakers under separate part-time contracts with each office. The Awan family members were each paid between $157,000 and $168,000 that year, making them among the highest-paid staffers on the Hill. The salary cap for a congressional staffer is $174,000.

Under House rules, employees in each congressional office are prohibited from sharing their job duties with others who are not directly employed by that office.

In his 2008 testimony, Cornell warned that a “growing number of shared employees are working in illegal teaming arrangements where they pass the work off to other shared employees not on the payroll of the congressional office they are serving.”

Gowen, the other attorney representing Imran Awan, acknowledged that the group filled in for each other at times.

“He’s working with family and friends, so there was some coverage by colleagues,” Gowen said.

Odd invoices

In March 2016, auditors in the House’s Chief Administrative Office discovered strange invoices for computer equipment — purchases that were broken into multiple payments of less than $500. Any purchases over that amount require equipment to be placed on an inventory that helps to track it.

After a referral to the inspector general’s office, investigators found that the IT workers had asked vendors “to split the cost of equipment among multiple items and charged these items as office supplies instead of equipment,” according to the September briefing document.

As of Sept. 1, 2016, there had been 34 purchases totaling nearly $38,000 “where the costs of the item was manipulated to obtain a purchase price of $499.99,” according to the document. There were $799 iPads and a $640 television on the list, records show.

Most of that equipment was left off the official House inventory, investigators found. And investigators found that some of it had been delivered to the homes of the Awan brothers, according to a person familiar with the investigation.

One vendor, CDW, received a subpoena from federal prosecutors in December, another person familiar with the procurement part of the probe said. The company said in a statement to The Post that it was cooperating with authorities and that prosecutors had assured the company it was not a target of the investigation.

Page, Imran Awan’s lawyer, said that the home-equipment deliveries were rare and made when his client planned to be away from the Capitol during the delivery. He declined to comment on other aspects of the equipment purchases.

When asked if his client was authorized to split equipment purchases into increments less than $500, Bacon, Abid Awan’s lawyer, said: “In a fluid situation you do what you’re ordered to do.” Any missing equipment, Bacon said, “disappeared after it was brought to the folks who were demanding it. . . . It sounds to me like there’s a lot of scapegoating here.”

The House is generally bad at keeping track of the millions of dollars worth of office equipment in its care, according to independent auditors. The past four annual audits have cited “ineffective controls over property and equipment” as a “significant deficiency” in the House, records show. “Inventory processes are not properly designed and are not operating effectively,” an audit found in 2014.

A spokesman for the Chief Administrative Office, which is required to do regular audits of House equipment, declined to comment.

Patrick J. Sowers, a part-time systems administrator for two House Republicans, said that it is common for IT workers to have equipment delivered off campus because deliveries at the Capitol require a time-consuming security screening process that is not necessary if an employee brings the equipment into the building.

“It’s possible that everything was done innocently,” Sowers said. “But when you add it all together, it does give the appearance that something was done inappropriately.”

Mapping a trail

By midsummer, with the approval of the House Administration Committee, the Inspector General’s Office was tracking the five employees’ logins. In October, they found “massive” amounts of data flowing from the networks they were accessing, raising the possibility that an automated program was vacuuming up information, according to a senior House official familiar with the probe.

Initially, investigators could not see precisely what kind of data was moving off the server due to legal protections afforded by the Constitution’s “speech and debate” clause, which shields lawmakers’ deliberations from investigators’ eyes.

Investigators found that the five IT employees had logged on at one server for the Democratic Caucus more than 5,700 times over a seven-month period, according to documents reviewed by The Post. Alvi, the only one of the five who was authorized to access that server, accounted for fewer than 300 of those logins, documents show.

The congressional networks they were accessing do not contain any classified information, which is held on separate servers that have rigid protections and very limited access. The House network does contain lawmakers’ email, but a senior House official said IT workers could not access it unless lawmakers provided their passwords.

The Inspector General’s Office reported on its findings in a series of briefings in late September and early October in the offices of the House speaker, the Democratic leader, the House Administration Committee, the sergeant at arms and the Capitol Police. The leadership agreed to refer the probe to Capitol Police and the FBI, who had the tools to conduct more thorough background checks and to access their financial records. The criminal investigation began in October.

At the time, the presidential election was underway, and Hillary Clinton was under FBI investigation to determine whether she had mishandled classified information by using a private email server in the basement of her house while she was secretary of state. About two weeks later, after Trump won the election, House leaders decided to take the highly unusual step of barring the five IT workers from the network.

The House sergeant at arms convened chiefs of staff in early February and told them that the IT workers were under investigation for suspicion of stealing equipment and potential security violations related to the House network. Most offices fired the IT staffers. But a few Democratic lawmakers defended the Awans, saying that they had not seen definitive evidence that the Awans did anything wrong.

“As of right now, I don’t see a smoking gun,” Rep. Gregory W. Meeks (D-N.Y.) told Politico in March. “I have seen no evidence that they were doing anything that was nefarious.”

Wasserman Schultz found a new consulting job for Imran Awan that did not require access to the House network and said publicly that she was concerned that the investigation was driven by ethnic and religious bias. The Awans are Muslims.

Her fierce defense of the Awans at times puzzled even some in her own party. In May, Wasserman Schultz chided the Capitol Police chief during a public hearing after officers confiscated a laptop that had been left in a Capitol Building hallway. It belonged to her office and had been issued to Imran Awan.

“I think you’re violating the rules when you conduct your business that way and should suspect there will be consequences,” Wasserman Schultz told the chief.

She has also suggested that data moving off her office’s server might have been files the office routinely stored on Dropbox, an Internet-based document-sharing service. House rules prohibit moving data off the main server, but Wasserman Schultz has said in a public hearing that House administrators had not made those rules clear.

“My concern was they were being singled out,” Wasserman Schultz told The Post.

Wasserman Schultz’s office has said it is cooperating with the investigation. It has hired an outside lawyer, William Pittard, and for a time considered whether to shield any information sought by investigators by asserting “speech and debate” protections.

“Ultimately, the congresswoman chose not to retain a single document on speech or debate or any other grounds in this investigation,” said David Damron, Wasserman Schultz’s communications director. Pittard is being paid by the congresswoman’s campaign for reelection.

Sowers, the systems administrator, said that while storing congressional data on Dropbox or other file-sharing services may be convenient, “anyone who is doing it is putting themselves at risk.”

“Hackers are out there constantly,” he said.

Page said he is confident the networking issues that helped kick off the criminal investigation will not result in charges.

“Everything we have heard, once stripped of any conspiratorial overtone, is consistent with how systems were set up and used in member offices,” the lawyer said. “None of this was invented by Imran. We don’t think that any of the systems were in violation of any rules or policies, and certainly Imran didn’t think so at the time.”

House staffers, meanwhile, have proposed a series of reforms in response to the controversy. They are under consideration by the House Administration Committee, according to two people with knowledge of the proposal. Those recommendations have not been released publicly, and officials declined to provide them.

The aftermath

The disclosure of the investigation led to a torrent of news stories in the conservative press, led by the Daily Caller. The coverage has delved into the Awans’ personal finances, side businesses and family disputes — producing an unflattering portrait.

Right-wing conspiracy theorists with large followings on the Internet have spun the revelations into intricate tales, trying to make the case that Imran Awan was the source of leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee that were published by WikiLeaks during last year’s presidential election. U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia was behind the hacking.

The unfounded speculation has found its way into coverage by Fox News.

“What if he was the source to WikiLeaks?” Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera said of Imran Awan during a July segment with host Sean Hannity after Awan’s arrest on bank-fraud charges. “He has all the passwords, he has all of the information. This is a huge story.”

According to charging documents, Imran Awan and Alvi took out two home-equity loans in December 2016, totaling $283,000, and wired the money to Pakistan on Jan. 18, about a week before they were banned from the House network.

On bank-loan applications to the Congressional Federal Credit Union, Alvi indicated that the couple lived in the two homes that were offered as collateral — but the homes were actually rental properties, according to the federal indictment. The bank does not offer home-equity loans on rental properties.

Imran Awan’s lawyers said Awan and Alvi have repaid the loans by cashing out their retirement funds. Page, Awan’s lawyer, would not address the wire transfers, but said that at the time Awan “was struggling to arrange an elaborate funeral for his father in Pakistan and fighting legal battles over inherited family property there.”

They were charged with bank fraud on July 24. Wasserman Schultz fired Imran Awan the same week.

Alvi had already left the United States for Pakistan, in March. Imran Awan’s lawyers said Alvi left to allow the family to rent out their home because they had lost their jobs and “to temporarily escape the media frenzy,” which included “harassment” of her three children at home and at school.

Federal agents and Capitol Police tried to question her at Dulles International Airport, but ultimately let her and her children board the plane. An FBI agent wrote in a court document that he did not believe she intended to come back. Alvi has agreed to return to the United States in late September, according to court documents.

Imran Awan is living with a relative in Virginia and wearing a GPS tracking device. He has given up his passport and is restricted from traveling farther than 50 miles from the home where he is staying.

Appearing at Imran Awan’s first court appearance on Sept. 1 was George Webb, a self-described citizen journalist from Fort Wayne, Ind., who has cultivated 40,000 followers by posting hundreds of conspiratorial videos on YouTube.

He filed papers asking the judge if he could present evidence in the bank-fraud case that would reveal a host of other crimes, including money laundering to terrorist organizations. The judge denied the unusual request. Outside the courthouse, Webb said that he believed prosecutors were conspiring with Awan’s lawyers to minimize the case.

“They’re orchestrating this thing, making it look like there’s a trial here,” Webb said. “There’s no trial here. They are trying to make this look like a small, simple bank fraud case. It’s not. It’s a spy ring in Congress.”