The saga of Imran Awan, the Debbie Wasserman Schultz staffer who was indicted along with his wife in August on four counts, including bank fraud and making false statements, took a more sinister turn on Wednesday, as reports surfaced that the laptop Schultz has been desperately trying to keep prosecutors from examining was planted in a tiny room by someone who left a note for the U.S. attorney.
That someone could have been Awan, who wanted police to find the laptop, which had the user name “RepDWS” listed.
There have been suspicions regarding Wasserman Schultz for months; after revelations of Awan’s criminality surfaced at the beginning of February, most of the legislators employing him fired him within weeks, but Wasserman Schultz did not fire him until after he was arrested on July 25 at Dulles International Airport while trying to flee to Pakistan.
U.S. Capitol Police found the laptop after midnight April 6, 2017, in the tiny room that formerly served as a phone booth in the Rayburn House Office Building, as a Capitol Police report stated. The laptop was accompanied by a Pakistani ID card, copies of Awan’s driver’s license and congressional ID badge, and letters to the U.S. attorney. A notebook found with the laptop had notes regarding “attorney-client privilege.”
As The Daily Caller pointed out, the room where the laptop was found is “a place Awan would have had no reason to go because Wasserman Schultz’s office is in the Longworth building and the other members who employed him had fired him.”
On May 18, 2017, Wasserman Schultz threatened Chief Matthew Verderosa after he stated he might not be able to return the laptop to her. She insisted that if a member of Congress lost their equipment, it should be returned. When Verderosa replied that there could be extenuating circumstances if the laptop was connected to a suspect, she warned, “I think you’re violating the rules when you conduct your business that way, and you should expect that there will be consequences.”
On August 3, Wasserman Schultz said she was only attempting to protect Awan, adding, “This was not my laptop. I have never seen that laptop. I don’t know what’s on the laptop.”
Rep. Louie Gohmert, (R-TX) told The Daily Caller News Foundation, “Imran Awan is a calculating person who made great efforts to cover his tracks, both electronically and physically. Placing that laptop with his personal documents, which may well incriminate him, those he worked for, or both, in the dead of night in a House office building, was a deliberate act by a cunning suspect, and it needs to be investigated.”