Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel on Wednesday called on Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Fla.) to testify before Congress on her recently arrested aide.
Wasserman Schultz, the former chair of the Democratic National Committee, fired IT staffer Imran Awan on Tuesday, the night after he was arrested at Dulles Airport in Virginia trying to leave the country. Federal agents charged Awan with bank fraud, the result of a months-long investigation.
Awan was one of five House contractors under investigation for stealing equipment from members' offices, exposing House information online, and other, potentially illegal violations on the House IT network.
Despite Awan being stripped of his House IT access and under investigation since February, Wasserman Schultz kept him on her payroll. The Florida Democrat later demanded the Capitol Hill police return a laptop pertinent to the investigation, threatening "consequences" if they did not.
"Debbie Wasserman Schultz absolutely needs to testify and explain why this individual was on taxpayer-funded payroll until yesterday, as he was fleeing the country, on top of the fact that they had removed his access to congressional computers in February," McDaniel told Breitbart on Wednesday.
"So she knew he was under investigation, she knew something was wrong, and she kept him on payroll," McDaniel continued. "So we need to figure out what she knew, why she was protecting this person, and figure out what he did with important government information."
McDaniel suggested that Awan might have had something to do with the hacking of the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 election.
"We need to have a full big picture as to what access this individual had not just to the congressional but also to the DNC servers," she said.
"We need to get to the bottom of it," McDaniel concluded. "It's very sad that the mainstream media is not talking about this at all. It shows the bias."
The RNC chairwoman was referring to the fact that major cable news networks, including CNN and MSNBC, have given no coverage to the matter.