There were no background checks conducted on the Pakistan-born IT aides who allegedly stole sensitive data from the House Democrats who employed them and made off with $6 million in a "ghost employee scheme," according to congressional documents.

The Daily Caller News Foundation reported all 44 of the Congress members who employed Imran Awan and his family members waived background checks, even though the family could collectively read all the emails and files of one in five House Democrats.

An inspector general's report had recommended background checks for such positions, the Daily Caller noted. But the House security policy includes a loophole allowing a member to state on required security forms that another member vouched for the person.

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As WND reported, IT staffer Imran Awan, his brothers Abid and Jamal, and their wives Natalia Sova and Hina Alvi, were highly paid IT administrators working for the House Democrats until Capitol Police began probing them in early 2017.

WND reported in January that the aides sometimes even logged in as congressmen to cover their tracks. Authorities said there is evidence the members' data may have been aggregated onto one server, which then was physically stolen.

The IT staffers allegedly ran a ghost employee scheme with a take of nearly $6 million over the years. After wiring approximately $300,000 to his native Pakistan in July, Imran Awan was arrested by the FBI at Dulles International Airport. He was then indicted on four counts of bank fraud in connection with his wire transfer. He was carrying $12,000 in cash on him at the time of his arrest.

However, there have been no criminal charges related to the House IT breach. The indictments of two of the suspects were only for bank fraud, after prosecutors said the suspects transferred money from the House bank to Pakistan and tried to flee the country.

A background check, the Daily Caller found, would have discovered in Abid's background a $1.1 million bankruptcy, six lawsuits against him or a company he owned, and at least three misdemeanor convictions, according to Virginia court records.

Imran and Abid, meanwhile, operated a car dealership that took $100,000 from an Iraqi government official who is a fugitive from U.S. authorities, according to public court records.

The Daily Caller also found that numerous members of the family were tied to shady companies that operated out of Imran’s residence. And there were numerous complaints to police by women regarding Imran Awan.

'It was a breach'

Without no background checks to prevent their hiring, the aides engaged in what a House Office of the Inspector General report summarized as a "classic method for insiders to exfiltrate data from an organization," the Daily Caller News Foundation reported.

The Sept. 20, 2016, report summarized the findings of a four-month internal investigation that found remote sessions on computers of members remained active for months at a time. A House committee staffer close to the probe told the Daily Caller News Foundation that "the data was always out of [the members'] possession."

"It was a breach. They were using the House Democratic Caucus as their central service warehouse."

The House report said all five of the shared employee system administrators collectively logged onto the Democrat members' system 5,735 times, an average of 27 times per day.

"This is considered unusual since computers in other offices managed by these shared employees were accessed in total less than 60 times," the report said.

Imran Awan spent several months each year in Pakistan and continued accessing the House server remotely when he was abroad.

Democratic Party lawmakers – with the exception of Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla. – fired the Awan family members as employees a year ago when suspicions were raised.

Awan worked for Wasserman Schultz for 13 years, beginning when she was first elected to Congress in 2004.

Among the 44 employers, the primary advocate for the suspects has been Wasserman Schultz who introduced a bill one week ago that would require background checks on Americans purchasing ammunition.

"Without bullets a gun is just a hunk of useless metal," she said, calling ammunition the "loophole" in gun-control policy.

None of the 44 members who hired the Awans disputed that they had not conducted a background check, the Daily Caller News Foundation said.

However, none would say which of their colleagues vouched for the Awans.

And they wouldn't disclose what criteria they used to determine whether or not they should give the Awans access to their data.

No classified information?

Awan remained on the payroll of Wasserman Schultz – who served as chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee when its IT network was hacked in 2016 – until he was arrested in July.

The Florida congresswoman insists Awan didn't have access to any classified information.

But, in an interview with WND in October, Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, rebutted the former DNC chair's claims, arguing that Democratic members of Congress who serve on intelligence committees would, by the nature of their work, correspond about sensitive information.

"The argument is that there was no classified information that was compromised or breached – that's what they said about Hillary Clinton at first," he said. "Some of them – like Andre Carson served on the Select Committee on Intelligence – would have access to the highest level of classified information that we have in the United States Congress."

King said the Democrats essentially surrendered highly classified material to anti-American Pakistani workers who "don't have allegiance to the United States."

"The GOP wants to put the government back on its rails again and operating efficiently. Democrats want to pull it down," he said. "When we hire people to work in our office, I want to make sure I am looking them in the eye. I want to know who's doing what work and what they're going to get paid for that. That's our jobs to do that.

"Instead, they are funneling taxpayer dollars to people who, at a minimum, are not natural-born American citizens. If they're sending money to Pakistan and absconding to Pakistan, they don't have allegiance to the United States, either."

The Awans could be just "a crooked family that found a way to scam the House of Representatives and skim wages out," he said.

But the worst-case scenario, King argued, is the Pakistani family funneled information or money "into the hands of the Taliban or ISIS."

Wasserman Schultz claimed it was "Islamophobia" that sparked the investigations.