By – Ruby Henley
Imran Awan first landed a job with former Democratic representative Robert Wexler as an “information technology director” in 2004. His younger brother, Jamal, was employed as an information technology worker for Democrat representative, Julia Brownley. It seems that our own U.S. tech workers are being ditched and even forced to train underqualified and under-vetted foreign replacements.
Congress set up the H-1B program to help American companies hire foreigners with exceptional skills, to fill open jobs and to help their businesses grow.
“The H-1B program is critical as a way for employers to fill skill gaps and for really talented people to come to the United States,” said Ronil Hira, a professor at Howard University who studies visa programs.
Were the Awans and their family and friends H-1B tech workers? There have been approximately 650,000 “temporary” foreign guest workers imported into America under that program over the past quarter-century and working in IT?
These foreign IT workers were, of course, paid for with our tax dollars; thus, Americans deserve to know their path to the inside of the U.S. government. These people have access to every record they choose to access! Why do many members of Congress support foreign guest worker programs such as H-1B? Why do they prefer to put foreign entities into government jobs instead of Americans?
Imran Awan has a longtime relationship with some members of Congress, including working for Meeks and Becerra, starting in 2004, and joining Wasserman Schultz’s office in 2005. The IT staffer position expanded to include more than 30 representatives, including work under congressional members who were members of top secret level congressional committees.
Our government under the Obama Administration preferred to hire those from foreign countries to work within the government of the United States. Unfortunately during the Obama years, many connected to the Muslim Brotherhood got inside the government. In the case of the Awans, this family is from Pakistan, and it seems that our CIA and the Pakistani ISI have a working relationship.
Although personal office computers are not supposed to be used for Intelligence Committee business or classified material, accessing these computers is a high priority for foreign intelligence services, because of the information they could glean about the committee’s work from unclassified emails.
The Awans had ‘the keys to the kingdom’ once they made it to Capitol Hill. Their Democrat benefactors allowed them to breech policy for the sake of convenience. They also operated an external server, which is against all protocols concerning secured government information. Everyone looked the other way.
As we go through this, it is absolutely amazing that Imran Awan is working – as we speak – for a Clinton-linked attorney, but Paul Manafort has been locked up. Think about that. Ask yourself who is really in control of our government?
Everything changed for the House IT staff in 2017. New rules went into place. The Awans were not happy.
Despite media claims that no Classified material was compromised, Idaho Republican Rep. Raul Labrador said, “This is pretty outrageous. These are people who had direct connections and access to the House, to intelligence information,… this is actually something that could directly affect the national security of the United States, and I have seen very little reporting, and apparently, the Democrats are not that interested.”
He went on to say, “An argument could also be made that the Awan brothers violated 18 U.S. Code § 793 – Gathering, transmitting, or losing defense information.”
If you think about how the Awans got away with so much, while The FBI Is building a national watchlist that gives companies real-time updates on employees for the rest of us, one is able to see the power the Awans had.
There needs to be additional scrutiny and changes to staffing policy in our government. The staff doesn’t need to be trusted by the representative, they need to be trusted by the country. In the corporate world, if the staff covers up crimes committed by the CEO they go to jail, but in Washington it seems to be a job requirement.
President Trump tweeted the following –
Our Justice Department must not let Awan & Debbie Wasserman Schultz off the hook. 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!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 7, 2018
”Our Justice Department must not let Awan & Debbie Wasserman Schultz off the hook. 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!”
The most shocking aspect of the Awan scandal is he allegedly transferred a USB drive to a Pakistani senator and former head of a Pakistani intelligence agency, the father’s ex-business partner, Rashid Minhas. It is an outrage this was allowed to happen, and the American people should be fuming.
Minhas told The Daily Caller News Foundation that Imran Awan’s father, Haji Ashraf Awan, was giving data to Pakistani official Rehman Malik, and that Imran bragged he had the power to “change the U.S. president.”
Asked for how he knew this, he said that on one occasion in 2008 when a “USB [was] given to Rehman Malik by Imran’s father, my brother Abdul Razzaq was with his father.”
“After Imran’s father deliver USB to Rehman Malik, four Pakistani [government intelligence] agents were with his father 24-hour on duty to protect him,” he said. Minhas did not say what was on the USB.
We will probably never know!
What is Imran Awan doing right now? He is working for his Clinton -linked attorney, while being free to go home at night. But Paul Manafort, who has done nothing to compare with what Imran Awan has done is locked in a jail cell at night. Something is very wrong here, and I have concluded that the Democrats and the Deep State are in control of the core government. It is the only thing that makes sense.
I want to conclude this report with a shocking connection to Imran Awan – Rahm Emanuel. The family of Imran Awan, the now-indicted former IT aide to Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz and other Democrats, was previously accused of fraud in Pakistan involving “huge chunks” of land, but the charges were dropped because “Awan’s son had easy access to the corridors of power,” according to a detailed article in a Pakistani newspaper.
Elderly farmers said Imran’s father ripped them off, but local police dropped charges against Imran’s father and targeted his accusers after alleged pressure from Pakistani national-level politicians, the Sept. 3, 2009, article in Dawn reported. The story was headlined, “Influential expat shields father from long arm of law.”
A Democratic IT aide said Imran told him a similar story in a House cafeteria in 2009 and said Imran claimed he persuaded Rahm Emanuel — the Obama White House chief of staff who employed the Awan family during his days as a congressman — to intervene. The Dawn article refers to Imran as a White House employee.
The dropped charges and alleged punishing of victims raise questions about whether congressional employers pulled in favors, and how an IT aide could have such influence.
I believe the true influence for Imran Awan lies in his connection to the Pakistani ISI. The CIA actually has an office at the Pakistani ISI, and that should speak for itself.
worldview.stratfor.com/article/pakistani-intelligence-and-cia-mutual-distrust-and-suspicion
Most CIA case officers (like most foreign-service officers) are Caucasian products of very good universities. They stick out when they walk down the street in places like Peshawar or Lahore. They do not blend into the crowd, are easily identified by hostile surveillance and are therefore vulnerable to attack.
Because of this, they need trained professional security officers to watch out for them and keep them safe. This is doubly true if the case officer is meeting with a source who has terrorist connections.
As a result, it is pretty much standard procedure for any intelligence officer meeting a terrorism source to have heavy security for the meeting. Even FBI and British MI5 officers meeting terrorism sources domestically employ heavy security for such meetings because of the potential danger to the agents.
The unforgiving terrain of the Pakistani badlands also requires human sources to direct intelligence assets toward a target. This increased human intelligence-gathering effort inside Pakistan has created friction between the CIA and the ISI.
First, it is highly likely that much of the intelligence used to target militants with UAV strikes in the badlands comes from the ISI — especially intelligence pertaining to militant groups like the TTP that have attacked the ISI and the Pakistani government itself. As would be expected, the CIA is doing its best to develop independent sources as well
The ISI has a great deal to gain by strikes against groups it sees as posing a threat to Pakistan, and the fact that the U.S. government is conducting such strikes provides the ISI a degree of plausible deniability and political cover. However, it is well known that the ISI has long had ties to militant groups.
The ISI’s fostering of surrogate militants to serve its strategic interests in Kashmir and Afghanistan played a critical role in the rise of transnational jihadism (and this was even aided with U.S. funding in some cases). Indeed, as we’ve previously discussed, the ISI would like to retain control of its militant proxies in Afghanistan to ensure that Pakistan does not end up with a hostile regime in Afghanistan following the U.S. withdrawal from the country. This is quite a rational desire when one considers Pakistan’s geopolitical situation.
Because of this, the ISI has been playing a kind of a double game with the CIA. It has been forthcoming with intelligence pertaining to militants it views as threats to the Pakistani regime while refusing to share information pertaining to groups it hopes to use as levers in Afghanistan (or against India). Of course, the ability of the ISI to control these groups and not get burned by them again is very much a subject of debate, but at least some ISI leaders appear to believe they can keep at least some of their surrogate militants under control.
There are many in Washington who believe the ISI knows the location of high-value al Qaeda targets and senior members of organizations like the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network, which are responsible for many of the attacks against U.S. troops in Afghanistan. This belief that the ISI is holding back intelligence compels the CIA to run unilateral intelligence operations (meaning operations it does not tell the ISI about).
Many of these unilateral operations likely involve the recruitment of Pakistani government officials, including members of the ISI. Naturally, the ISI is not happy with these intelligence operations, and the result is the mistrust and tension we see between the ISI and the CIA. It is important to remember that in the intelligence world there is no such thing as a friendly intelligence service.
While services will cooperate on issues of mutual interest, they will always serve their own national interests first, even when that places them at odds with an intelligence service they are coordinating with. Such competing national interests are at the heart of the current tension between the CIA and the ISI.