How big is the awan scandal…that most mainstream media desperately continue to bury?
This big – as excerpted from Paul Sperry’s article in the New York Post:
Federal authorities are investigating whether sensitive data was stolen from congressional offices by several Pakistani-American tech staffers and sold to Pakistani or Russian intelligence, knowledgeable sources say.
What started out 16 months ago as a scandal involving the alleged theft of computer equipment from Congress has turned into a national security investigation involving FBI surveillance of the suspects.
Investigators now suspect that sensitive US government data — possibly including classified information — could have been compromised and may have been sold to hostile foreign governments that could use it to blackmail members of Congress or even put their lives at risk.
“This is a massive, massive scandal,” a senior US official familiar with the widening probe told The Post.
During the probe, investigators found valuable government data that is believed to have been taken from the network and placed on offsite servers, setting off more alarms. Some 80 offices were potentially compromised.
Most lawmakers fired the alleged “ringleader” — longtime IT staffer Imran Awan — in February. But Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the former Democratic National Committee chief, kept Awan on her payroll until his arrest last month on seemingly unrelated charges of defrauding the congressional credit union.
For more than a decade, Awan, his wife, two relatives and a friend worked for 30 House Democrats. They included New York City pols Gregory Meeks, Joseph Crowley and Yvette Clarke and members of the sensitive Intelligence and Foreign Relations committees.
For starters, I do not see how Debbie Wasserman Schultz survives this scandal.
I expect Schultz to either decline to run for re-election or to resign outright. And if she does try to run, it’s an excellent bet Schultz will have primary competition – which probably will be supported by other, understandably terrified, Democrats who do not want to lose their seats because of her umbilical attachment to the awans.
And, it is more than a little possible, Shultz is just the tip of the iceberg.
This is already a huge scandal, and it is getting bigger. Can the Democrat-protecting “journalists”on the networks, and the New York Times, Washington Post, et al, keep it under the sheets?
Their prospects for doing so are getting dimmer by the day.
