The House Taxed Enough Already (TEA Party) Caucus invited some of the leading investigative journalists covering the developing Imran Awan scandal to Capitol Hill Tuesday, despite a lack of outward support from House GOP leadership.
“It’s like there’s a new monthly revelation … it gets stranger and stranger,” Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), who chaired the event, said of the slow-burning Awan Affair, which currently stands with its namesake former Debbie Wasserman Schultz IT staffer behind bars on a bank fraud charge.
Awan was arrested trying to flee to his native Pakistan ahead of hundreds of thousands of dollars in wired funds. That incident was merely an exclamation mark on a months-long saga that has seen accusations against Awan and other members of his family ranging from theft of government IT equipment to domestic abuse. Perhaps most concerning are reports he may have stolen terabytes of Democratic members’ unclassified private info.
Gohmert was joined by fellow caucus members Reps. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Jim Jordan (R-OH), Ron DeSantis (R-FL), and Scott Perry (R-PA). Answering the Congressmen’s questions were Luke Rosiak – the Daily Caller investigative reporter who broke much of the Awan affair –Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, who helped organize the meeting; and Pat Sowers, an IT Systems Administrator. The group delved deep into the Awan Affair, fleshing out many of the details that have proven elusive for months and speculating at worse case scenarios.
Absent, however, was any representative of House leadership, who offered no support for Tuesday’s unofficial “hearing” and have not called for any official House probe or hearing.
Asked if there was “resistance to a formal hearing,” Gohmert replied, “I don’t know, there hasn’t been one.”
“I think [members of leadership] realize it is serious, but we just don’t have enough information to know exactly how serious. That’s one of the reasons we’re doing this today,” he told Breitbart News.
DeSantis was more emphatic, telling Breitbart News:
We don’t see action being taken in the House, and I urged us to do a thorough investigation. Whatever’s being done with the FBI criminally and the U.S. Attorney’s office is important, but that may not even get into some of these issues, about the integrity of the House, of what was compromised, and you don’t want to wait for the end of that before we can take measures to hold members accountable or to take corrective action so it doesn’t happen again.
Leaving the meeting, he added, “We’re at a point where we’re impatient and we want to get investigating, and get these answers.”
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