"Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the Pakistani IT Scammers/There’s more than bank fraud going on here."

I've been avoiding blogging this story because I've been waiting for something with the right kind of clarity and detail, so I'm heartened to see Andrew C. McCarthy writing about it. Excerpt:

Awan and his family cabal of fraudsters had access for years to the e-mails and other electronic files of members of the House’s Intelligence and Foreign Affairs Committees. It turns out they were accessing members’ computers without their knowledge, transferring files to remote servers, and stealing computer equipment — including hard drives that Awan & Co. smashed to bits of bytes before making tracks.

They were fired in February. All except Awan, that is. He continued in the employ of Wasserman Schultz, the Florida Democrat, former DNC chairwoman, and Clinton crony. She kept him in place at the United States Congress right up until he was nabbed at the airport on Monday....

Congressional-staff salaries are modest, in the $40,000 range. For some reason, Awan was paid about four times as much. He also managed to get his wife, Alvi, on the House payroll . . . then his brother, Abid Awan . . . then Abid’s wife, Natalia Sova. The youngest of the clan, Awan’s brother Jamal, came on board in 2014 — the then-20-year-old commanding an annual salary of $160,000....

Why were they paid so much for doing so little? Intriguing as it is, that’s a side issue....

ADDED: Here's how the NYT is covering it: "Trump Fuels Intrigue Surrounding a Former I.T. Worker’s Arrest." Trump! This is a story about Trump?!

To hear some commentators tell it, with the help of his family and a cushy job on Capitol Hill, Mr. Awan, a Pakistani-American, had managed to steal computer hardware, congressional data and even — just maybe — a trove of internal Democratic National Committee emails that eventually surfaced last summer on WikiLeaks. It helped that the story seems to involve, if only tangentially, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Florida congresswoman who is the former chairwoman of the committee and an ally of Hillary Clinton’s.

The Daily Caller, with almost two dozen articles on the family, has led the pack in reporting the story, packaging new details that have dribbled out of the investigation into a growing web of material, even as few in the mainstream news media paid attention.

That is until Monday, when Mr. Awan was arrested by the F.B.I. and United States Capitol Police on seemingly unrelated charges as he tried to board a flight to Pakistan. In the days since, the story has raced down an increasingly familiar track at warp speed, from the fringes of the internet to Fox News and other established publications....

AND: I left out my favorite line from the NYT article:

Xochitl Hinojosa, a spokeswoman for the Democratic committee, called the suggestion “laughable.”

“He was never employed by the D.N.C.,” she said. “The U.S. intelligence community has concluded that Russia was behind the D.N.C. hack.”

Does Hinojosa have any idea that she's heightening our suspicion of the opinion of the U.S. intelligence community?

Don't think about that! It would be ridiculous to question the Russian story they got everyone to sign onto.

ALSO: For months, we've been encouraged to imagine a big conspiracy involving Trump and the Russians. Why wouldn't that make ordinary people sensitive to suggestions of other conspiracies? It requires strong partisanship to keep conspiracy thinking going only in one direction, but plenty of us are distanced from both parties. We may have free-flowing suspicion. If there are conspiracies, are there not layers and layers before you get to the truth? That's what's so funny about the Hinojosa quote. Pointing at a closed door and saying that door has been closed works as an enticement to open that very door.