The disgraced Information Technology expert for the House of Representatives, Imran Awan, is suing The Daily Caller and their reporter Luke Rosiak, who also wrote a book about Awan, for defamation. He may be able to pull it off, whether the allegations are accurate or not, simply because, technically, Awan never committed any “crimes.”
Imran Awan, along with his wife, two brothers and a friend, filed the lawsuit complaining that the news stories “turned their lives upside down,” leading to “extreme financial hardship” and “emotional distress.”
The way their lawyer puts it, “This lawsuit seeks accountability for a relentless, xenophobic campaign of defamatory attacks that have destroyed the reputations and ruined the livelihoods of a group of Pakistani-American Muslims who were employed as information-technology workers in the U.S. House of Representatives.” Conservatives still call them spies.
Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. But, in this case, the Attorney General’s Cyber Digital Task Force gave Imran Awan and his family free passes. They buried the reason why on page 122 of the summary released by Rod Rosenstein in July of 2018. Since Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and other Democrats asked him to work on the computers, nothing he did could be considered a crime. As a result, it further meant that whatever he did with anything he accessed couldn’t even be investigated, much less lead to charges.
Rosenstein wasn’t happy to explain to lawmakers that “If the CFAA can be used only against outsiders with no right at all to access computers, many insider threats – including those in the intelligence and law enforcement communities with access to extremely sensitive information – may go unpunished.” Not only that, it opens the door for false arrest and defamation claims.
The only thing they could arrest him on was bank fraud. He signed a plea deal in 2018, was sentenced to time served, and walked away. There were also big piles of computer equipment that walked away, allegedly stuffed with U.S. secrets and mailed off to Pakistan. But again, there wasn’t any crime. The House Democrats who owned the equipment unanimously decided not to press any charges when it came up missing. Instead they wrote it off as bonuses for the exceptional IT work. Many wonder if they were blackmailed.
According to the new lawsuit, “While he was never charged with a crime connected to his government work, conservative media outlets speculated about his possible connections to the hack of the DNC in the 2016 election in a conspiracy theory that was promoted by President Donald Trump on Twitter.”
The way the lawyers tap-danced around that was truly artistic. Prosecutors, they say, “found no evidence [Awan] ILLEGALLY removed House data from the House network or from House Members’ offices, STOLE the House Democratic Caucus Server, STOLE or destroyed (never came up) House information technology equipment, or IMPROPERLY accessed or transferred government information.” You can email your thanks to the Cyber Digital Task Force.
Another thing he’s wrapped up in that can’t be proven is the hack on the DNC server “officially” blamed on “12 Russian hackers.” It looks a whole lot more like an inside job with Guccifer 2.0 a convenient alter ego for Imran Awan.