House IT Aides (Imran and Abid Awan) Ran Car Dealership With Markings Of A Nefarious Money Laundering Operation

DC: The used car dealership known as CIA never seemed like an ordinary car dealership, with inventory, staff and expenses.

On its Facebook page, CIA’s “staff” were fake personalities such as “James Falls O’Brien,” whose photo was taken from a hairstyle model catalog, and “Jade Julia,” whose image came from a web page called “Beautiful Girls Wallpaper.”

If a customer showed up looking to buy a car from Cars International A, often referred to as CIA, Abid Awan — who was managing partner of the dealership while also earning $160,000 handling IT for House Democrats — would frequently simply go across the street to longstanding dealership called AAA Motors and get one.

“If AAA borrows a car to Cars International and they have a customer, it was simply take the car across the street and sell it, and then later on give the profit back or not,” Nasir Khattak, who ran the longstanding AAA dealership, testified in a lawsuit. “There was no documentation which is write every transaction that takes place. … If you go and try to dissect, you will not be able to make any sense out of them because there were many, dozens and dozens, of cars transferred between the two dealerships and between other people.”

Khattak did not explain why he would ruin his existing business to help the Awans. “All of those transactions was to support Cars International A from AAA Motors,” he testified. “That’s why I did not make any money from my dealership because my resources were supporting Cars International A.”

He said only Imran Awan knew what became of the money. “It was Imram, [Abid] Awan’s brother, who was running the business in full control,” he said.

Imran Awan and his family members were congressional IT aides who investigators said made unauthorized access to the House Democratic Caucus server thousands of times. At the same time as they worked for and could read all the emails of members of the House intelligence, homeland security and foreign affairs committees, they also ran a car dealership that took money from a Hezbollah-linked fugitive and whose financial books were indecipherable and business patterns bizarre, according to testimony in court records.

While Imran and Abid Awan ran their car dealership in Falls Church, Va. in the early part of the decade, Drug Enforcement Agency officials a few miles away in Chantilly were learning that the Iranian-linked terrorist group frequently deployed used car dealerships in the US to launder money and fund terrorism, according to an explosive new Politico expose.

The money that disappeared between the Awans’ dealership, some $7 million in congressional pay, the equipment suspected of disappearing from Congress under their watch, and their other side businesses — all while they displayed few signs of wealth and frequently haggled in court over small amounts of money — raise questions about whether the Awans might have been laundering money or sending it to a third party.

“Based on the modest way Awan was living, it is my opinion that he was sending most of his money to a group or criminal organization that could very well be connected with the Pakistani government,” said Wayne Black, a private investigator who served as law enforcement group supervisor in Janet Reno’s Miami public corruption unit. “My instincts tell me Awan was probably operating a foreign intelligence gathering operation on US soil.”

Officials told Politico that prosecutors refused to help them punish top Hezbollah operatives involved in its money laundering network because of political concerns, such as fears of jeopardizing the Obama administration’s deal with Iran.  read more  [It gets worse]